As Dan Dunn attacks the canvas with strokes, dabs and splashes of paint, he’s teasing his audience as well.
His furious — but deliberate — actions loosely mirror the beats of the accompanying soundtrack. Simulating drum play, he rhythmically manipulates a brush in either hand; fingers doused with paint tiptoe across the canvas to a piano solo.
A few minutes and several finishing strokes later, Dunn spins to the canvas to reveal his creation — this time, it’s a portrait of Ray Charles. (The careful observer would then note that the soundtrack was a medley of Ray Charles hits.)
Welcome to Dan Dunn’s Paintjam, speed painting as performance, a show he’s taken to 89 U.S. cities and 11 countries, to television with Ellen Degeneres and Jimmy Fallon, among others, to Simon Cowell’s 50th birthday party in London, to a private event with Sir Richard Branson.
“She put it on her Facebook page and said ‘look at my dad on YouTube’,” Dunn said.
One day the video had 10,000 views; a week later it had 1 million. Now, that one video has been viewed 13.4 million times. Dunn and Paintjam had gone viral, getting 40 to 50 offers a day to perform around the globe.
It wasn’t always like this. Dunn grew up in Binglewood (where he and his wife, Cindy, now own a house on the same block as his parents). A self-described “at-risk” teenager, Dunn, 54, failed ninth grade, but managed to graduate on-time with Northbrook High School’s first class in 1975.
His father had him tested for aptitude, and Dunn was off the charts in art, scoring in the top 2 percent. So off he went to art school at Sam Houston State University, majoring in painting but also doing “a lot of sculpting,” he said.
He eked out a living as a caricaturist for years, dabbling in a few other ventures along the way.
“I loved caricature and dealing with people,” Dunn said. But he’d also reached a point where, with mounting debt and five children (“I’m a very creative guy,” he says, wryly), his wife asked, “What are we going to do now?”
Well-known speed painter Denny Dent died in 2004, leaving the field “wide open,” Dunn said. Dunn took an untested speed painting show to a Fourth of July event in The Woodlands, got a little publicity from Channel 11 (and YouTube) and the rest is history.
He began doing shows for corporate and nonprofit events — still his bread-and-butter — refining his act and learning how to travel with his equipment.
Along the way he got noticed by talent managers at SL Feldman and Associates, a Vancouver, B.C.-based agency, who are helping Dunn expand his show to include multiple paintings and illusions — to become a full-fledged production.
Inspiration
“What drives me is the idea of taking things to the next level if you want to succeed,” said Dunn, who takes inspiration from the biographies of Walt Disney, Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin.
Dunn tried out that next level with three workshop performances at Westchester Academy of International Studies last weekend. The shows were a raw, trial run of a multifaceted stage event called “Paint! Live on Stage!”.
“This show has all these moving pieces,” Dunn said. “I have to be like a conductor and coordinate all these people.”
Besides incorporating other on-stage artists, Paint! mixes in sand art — Dunn leads the audience on an American musical journey using his fingers, sand and a light table — more speed painting and optical illusions.
Dunn and his team spent six weeks putting together the workshop performance, and encouraged audience members to share their critiques and thoughts following each performance.
In the end, Dunn thinks the workshops went well, and the show merits further development.
“It has good bones,” he said, “(and) plenty of potential to be a really good show. It was a great workshop and now we clearly see what needs to happen to get it polished.”
He and his team will be working on that polish around a full calendar of corporate and non-profit gigs, trying to stay a step ahead of competition.
“When Walt Disney got into animation it was 20 years old, and people were bored with it,” Dunn said. “Disney set Mickey Mouse to music, then produced ‘Snow White’ in color.
“That’s my hero,” he said. “He was always taking it to the next level.”
By RUSTY GRAHAM
The Examiner
