Pop Culture Thrift Art With Painter @davepollotart
To see more photos of Dave’s paintings, follow @davepollotart on Instagram.
The art of Dave Pollot (@davepollotart) exists at the crossroads of Midwestern prairie fields and Mario Kart races. His MO: repurposing generic canvases he finds in thrift stores with pop culture ephemera. “It started with painting monsters and odd objects into them, and then it grew into the whole pop culture thing,” says Dave, whose past work includes the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, Mr. Potato Head, the Millennium Falcon, Godzilla and the Starship Enterprise illustrated into Americana landscapes of farmland and beaches. “It’s part of the fun, not only taking some piece of pop culture and putting it into a place where it might not belong, but also making it blend in so well that it actually seems that it belongs.”
Growing up in a small town in Central New York, Pollot started painting when he was about six years old. His father often painted Bob Ross-style works, which Dave emulated before moving on to pieces based on architecture, and then ultimately settling on the movie and video game visuals he’s known for now.
Though Dave’s repurposed paintings have become popular among the sci-fi fan community, it’s still just a side-gig for him. During the day, he’s a software engineer in Rochester, New York. But once he gets off work, he heads home, goes to his basement, cracks open a craft beer and gets to work on his creations.
It takes Dave an average of 16 hours to finish a piece. The process is often stressful, he says, because there’s a much slimmer margin of error when painting on existing work. But even when his work is being presented at shows, he tries not to take it all too seriously. “Art these days — and I will be careful with my words — I think it’s become a little too serious,” he says. “So I think it’s kind of nice to sometimes take a step back and just laugh at art.”
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