Denny Dent, Artist Who Painted The Famous
Bill Schenley
Denny Dent, a performance artist who frenetically splashed,
dabbed and spilled his way to quirky celebrity by lighting
into six-foot-high canvases with three paintbrushes in each
hand to produce portraits of famous people - sometimes
working on an upside-down canvas that he would then right -
died on Monday in Aurora, Colo. He was 55 and lived in
Denver.
The cause was multiple organ failure, said Harris Goldberg,
Mr. Dent's manager.
Mr. Dent, who billed his artistic onslaught as the
"Two-Fisted Art Attack," played to 300,000 people at the
25th anniversary Woodstock festival in 1994. His subjects
included presidents, a pope, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and,
most frequently, rock stars, dead and alive. He completed
the portraits in the time of a song or two, usually seven
minutes, and sold some for as much as $60,000 each.
Mr. Dent could also paint with his feet, but seldom did so
in public. What he called his "dance on canvas" featured
maniacal, mesmerizing movement, but he regarded the sermons
he shouted over the music while he painted as his main
mission. He said he turned down mention in the Guinness Book
of World Records as the world's fastest artist because he
feared the distinction might detract from his inspirational
message about the saving graces of art.
"I'm out to disturb the heart of the nation," he told former
President Gerald R. Ford when he painted him in eight
minutes at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, according to an
article in The Rocky Mountain News in 1995. "I've got no
time to lose."
His hybrid art form of painting, music and choreography rang
the cash register to the tune of $25,000 a performance at
rock concerts, corporate get-togethers and other events.
Sometimes Mr. Dent referred to himself as an "artrepreneur."
At other times he called himself "a kid playing in mud."
Dennis Eugene Dent was born in Oakland, Calif., on April 5,
1948. His mother was an artist who during her pregnancy
painted what she imagined his face would be, he said in an
interview with The Detroit Free Press in 1997. His
grandfather insisted that the family was directly descended
from Titian, according to an article in Northwest Airlines
World Traveler in 1999.
His boyhood family - which consisted of his mother,
grandmother, aunt, uncle, 5 dogs, 18 cats and hundreds of
goldfish - was on welfare, The Rocky Mountain News said. He
dropped out of school in the 10th grade and alternated
between what he called "drunken artist" binges and making a
living doing commercial art.
In 1981, he was spending days in a bar in Las Vegas,
"trading pictures for pitchers," in his phrase, when he
heard that a radio station was planning a vigil in a local
park to observe the first anniversary of John Lennon's
murder.
"I called the radio station and said that I'd like to come
and express myself," Mr. Dent told The Rocky Mountain News.
"They said, `What do you do?' and I told them I could paint
with both hands. I was very emotional, and they sensed that
and saw that I was basically harmless, so they said, `Sure,
come and do it.' "
By his own description, he sounded like a cross between a
Southern Baptist preacher and Jack Kerouac. The crowd went
wild, and a promoter asked him the name of his show. "Show?
What show?" Mr. Dent replied, according to an article in The
Christian Science Monitor in 2000.
He was hired to do his instant-painting act at the
Troubadour in Los Angeles as an opening act for Steppenwolf.
His performance took shape as he toured colleges with the
B-52's.
He prepared for painting a new subject by using photographs
to make a composite sketch and then added music and
choreography. When the show began, "I just get up there and
go nuts," he told The Rocky Mountain News.
He painted a galaxy of rock stars with their own music
playing, painted Mozart and Beethoven accompanied by
symphony orchestras, President Clinton at his inauguration,
Pope John Paul II at a Denver youth rally, and Mr. Giuliani
to the strains of opera arias.
Art critics, if they noticed Mr. Dent at all, were not
uniformly dazzled. Randy Gragg, writing in The Oregonian in
1999, said that Mr. Dent's works "wouldn't earn a C in any
local art school's second-year painting class," and observed
that Elvis Presley's mouth resembled "the entrance to a
theme-park ride."
Mr. Dent, who is survived by his wife, Ali Christina Flores,
conceded that he could not draw a straight line. But he said
the point of art was to help one stretch oneself, something
he did quite literally, as evidenced by several herniated
discs.
"You have to take chances and fall down and look stupid or
you'll never know what you missed," he said to The Rocky
Mountain News. "You can fall asleep for a lifetime and miss
the whole thing."
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Denny Dent paintings:
http://www.dennydent.com/performance.html