ISSUE 20 - (ARTIST) DANNY DOBEL

Details. Danny Dobel’s latest work is just that. His latest series of artwork is heavy on details. Currently he is finishing pieces done in pointillism, the last of eight in this series. Pieces of art done in this style are made of very small marks or dots to crate a larger, lucid, image.
The original method of pointillism invented by Georges Seurat in the 19th century, involved using paint to create this effect. Dobel uses pens, preferring ink rather than paint. As one could imagine, this process is time consuming. But what separates pointillism artwork and how Dobel does it is in the complexity of his marks. Every inch of the piece is soaked in the detail of tiny marks made by a pen whose tip is tiny.
“I use a pen that has a point smaller than the tip of your hair and use these tiny dots to make the picture come together,” Dobel says. He sighs and continues, “One picture takes hundreds of hours to complete, but I have the patience for it.”
Dobel self describes his tendency, and enjoyment, as a perfectionist. There’s twice as much detail as perhaps necessary in the pieces. He claims to over analyzes things and it flows into the artwork.
It began with waiting on a car ride. Friends were dropping by to pick Dobel up and there was time to kill. Nonchalantly he started on a picture composed entirely of dots. After working for a short while, he found that he enjoyed the work.
“I liked the challenge of it. I’m a meticulous person, with detail,” he says. “With pointillism you can go far into detail and make a lot of structure.”
It’s a style that takes many, many hours to complete one picture, several hours to finish a few inches of artwork on a given piece. Some pictures have taken over six hundred hours to complete. At the bottom of these drawings are multiple tiny lines, four up and down and one slashed through the four. There are numerous sets of these marks, each signifying the number of hours he’s clocked on each piece.




“I don’t know if I want to stick with it, ” Dobel pauses, “It’d be cool to be known as a pointillism artist.”
In each piece there are tiny drawings within the larger piece, small characters, faces and so on. Turning a piece clockwise will reveal another drawing within the whole. The pieces defy congruity with what is accepted as norm in a piece of art. Some pieces could be hanged as the owner desires, defying convention.
Each piece began without a preliminary sketch, with a very general idea. “I feel that sketching constrains possibilities,” he says. His ink pen drops to the paper and a picture slowly comes to life. Each one, standing on their own, but all individually powerful in their imagery and design.
“I come up with ideas for pictures and instead of doing sketches I just start on it. I move from one piece to another. By the time I finished the first three I was on my eighth one.”




However, the Flower piece is one of the few that had any type sketching prior to starting. The leaves, their shapes, were something that needed to be done prior to all those tiny markings.
He sketched the leaves for the flower on that piece but then added cardboard as matting later for the other flowers. He had no idea that he was going to do that. The result was the piece as pointillism but with added sculpture or the added texture of raised flowers.
“I work five hours and I get a two by two inch area done. The next day you have a different view of it. I take pictures and it’s weird to see how it progresses. I don’t use a magnifying glass because I figure I’d be going way overboard with it. But it’s easier to work as I go instead of seeing a big picture. I can figure out more ways to be creative as you go.”


Dobel is self taught, or was, until attending the Art Institute in Dallas. But he still maintains that ingenuity of being a self taught artist. Each year he likes to tackle another medium. This year he plans to learn about working with charcoal.
“I’m still trying to figure out what kind of artist I am. In school they teach certain ways to draw. For instance, in school they teach you how to draw the skeletal system. I used to draw the skeletal system on my own. Now that I know, I have knowledge of how to draw the skeleton. I don’t know how I did it before.”
Returning home from college Dobel received a nickname, a name that has stuck, Texas. His friends call him by that and it’s common enough that he now naturally introduces himself that way.
“I went to school in Texas and all my friends starting calling me that. I can’t avoid it,” he says. “I hardly ever hear my real name.”
He went to school for graphic design, enjoying it for the most part, taking advantage of working with Adobe software when it first came into use. The plan was to focus on computer graphics but things changed.
“I wanted to be a mutli-media artist,” he says, wanting to continue learning. People told him that to be famous at art the artist ahs to be dead.
“I want to defy that notion,” he says.






There are no artistic people in his family he claims. Born from parents of different races, his father black, his mother white, Danny lived in Nuremberg, Germany until the age of twelve when his family moved back to the United States. Danny’s father was in the Army and the family settled in Wilmington a year and a half after coming home.
The change wasn’t much in the way of culture shock but it was difficult at times. He found it different in the States, groups that were separate.
“I was trying to be friends with everyone and not understanding why everyone wasn’t wanting to be friends,” he explains. Growing up overseas there was a lot of time to himself, the family travelling a lot. It was hard to make friends.
He started drawing around the age of four. There were no ambitions in his youth concerning art. But in school, a teacher assigned project to create a collage with pieces of colored paper. Dobel saw more than collage. He saw lakes, and trees and a bridge. And instead of a collage he built those things.
“The teacher said it had a lot of artistic value,” he says. “I guess getting praise from people made me stand out and it inspired me to continue. That kind of attention motivated me to become better.”
In Wilmington he became more active with art. In middle school there was a contest to design a cover for a department store Christmas catalog. He can’t remember the store, Sears or JC Penny’s, and his work was selected. Local artist Pat Sullivan helped him along the way. He created work to sell at the Azalea Festival, created portraits of people over the years and completed murals for homes. Also, while in school, he learned magic and between classes in Dallas, would go to the YMCA and entertain the children.
He also found an interest in cartooning. Studying a book helped him learn to draw cartoon characters. It simply was another style of art he wanted to pursue.
“I found myself in a rut,” he explains. “Pointillism is detailed where cartooning is not.”


The piles of sketchbooks and stacks of portfolios display numerous drawings by Dobel. A large bookcase on the opposite wall behind Dobel’s work table is crowded with books on anatomy, Salvador Dali and work from school. The bedroom walls are covered with tattoo sketches. Above a dresser, a large, poster-size drawing take sup much of the wall. It is a knight upon a horse made up of shapes and vibrant colors.
The knight is a piece finished in 1999, during a difficult period of his life. Art is very important to Dobel. Years ago, his car was totaled. It was a choice between buying a new car or art supplies. Dobel chose the latter, opting to walk a lot and keep at his artistic endeavors. The goal of being a successful artist is more important than an immediate material object.
“A goal comes with challenges; otherwise, there wouldn’t be any satisfaction in reaching them. That would be like setting a goal of getting dressed in the morning,” he says.
Future plans include putting together an art show and a selection of images concerning AIDS awareness, artistic images that juxtapose sexual images with harsh results of hasty decisions. It will be series of beuaitful images and at the bottom names of STD’s or AIDS information.
“Pieces that burn into someone’s mind. beautiful images and name of an STD at the bottom. I thought it would be an interesting piece to do. You see something beautiful and don’t think about that at all. Taking risks without thinking” The goal is to get people to think through pieces of art.
And then there’s writing. Dobel wants to write a book on racism to instill a change how people think about it.
“I don’t believe in race,” he always says. “It shouldn’t matter.”