>Studio Visit: Bill Donovan (self-portrait)

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This is the garage I work in.  Straight Sexy, haha.

What can I say?

I like art a lot. I guess that’s obvious.  This has high-gloss acrylic on it, so its too shiny to photograph well.  If you like my photos, then you like it raw anyways.

I like seeing what other people are up to, but it feels uncomfortable to expose myself. The way I’m going bald looks like a double mohawk, you can’t take the punk out of the boy.  I did have a mohawk once, as a dare, I gave it myself on the last day of highschool with a pair of scissors.

I’ve always liked to draw Laur. She’s my dream girl.  When I was in college I made about 50 paintings of her, and they were how I got into the painting program at the University of Iowa.  When I was 21 I won a $600 fellowship from paintings of Laur, that was a lot to me back then.

Ok, so this drawing is a little weird. I made it as a way to explain why I draw old cartoons, to give it a backstory. So I drew (copied) all these old portraits, along with a couple from a J Crew catalog, and was thinking of them as the founders of a cult that worships my strange cartoons. That way my irrational predilection for drawing early Americana cartoons would be explained, but in retrospect I just made it weirder. That’s where my natural talent lies anyways.