Dana Blume: From Rubens to Looney Toons

“Most of my work has some element of humor, maybe through some of those aesthetic qualities I mentioned above like cuteness or cartooniness, that provides an air of levity or optimism to more troubling aspects of the human condition.”

Imagining a World Without Daisies, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in.

SARAHCROWN: How did you decide to become an artist? Tell us a bit about what led you to be a painter.

Dana Blume: Well I was always interested in drawing as a kid, I would get really fixated on specific images and draw them over and over again. Like the face of Alfred E. Neumann from MAD Magazine... I must’ve drawn his portrait hundreds of times between the ages of 8-10 years old. I was drawing from lots of stuff: comic books, album covers, characters in movies, skateboard graphics... At that time skateboard graphics were super aimed at reaching a young audience and they were really juvenile and kind of scary, violent and funny. Those qualities really attracted me. I didn’t draw much as a teenager but after high school I took a painting class at a local community college in San Diego and I fell in love with it. From there I transferred to California State University of Long Beach and they had a very good painting and drawing program. It was a really intense environment and the stakes felt very high. Sometime when I was there I decided I wanted to pursue being an artist seriously.

SC: What are your main sources of inspiration?

DB: I think I still take a lot of inspiration from those things that really fascinated me as a kid (cartoons, graphics, movie etc.). That stuff seems to always find its way in whether I’m conscious of it or not. Lately I’ve been drawing a lot from history paintings as a way to generate imagery. Those hunting paintings and etchings from Peter Paul Rubens are particularly interesting to me. They are super over the top heroic paintings and the compositions are so explosive but everything seems to be exactly in the right place. They are so intricate and super fun to look at. I’ll pull up reproductions of paintings to reference while I’m drawing/painting, just sort of studying the way shapes of light and dark populate the rectangle and eventually start searching for new forms in that abstraction. Naturally I find myself searching for sort of cartoonish, sort of grotesque, sort of cutesy, sort of scary forms... I really like the idea of taking a historic painting that depicts a super heroic and clear narrative, then repurposing it to depict something nonsensical, sluggish, monstrous, and definitely not heroic.

Doom Cloud, Oil on canvas,  60 x 72 in.

SC: Are there any artists, movements, or cultural influences that inspire you or impact your work?

DB: Yes, very much so. I’ll actually get sort of fixated on specific artists or a group of artists for periods of time. I think its pretty evident that Philip Guston and the generation of figurative artists he inspired weighs pretty heavy on my mind. When I was early on formally learning to draw I was really fascinated by Käthe Kollwitz. There was a special collections library at California State University of Long Beach that had a bunch of her prints you could have pulled out and put on an easel to sit and draw from. I think she was very influential to what I’m doing now: using a combination of external references, your imagination, and convention to “Frankenstein” a somewhat naturalistic image together. There are so many artists that have been influential to me, I could talk pretty endlessly about that...

SC: Are there recurring themes or concepts that shape your artworks? Describe.

DB: As I mentioned above, most of the stuff I make is kind of scary, kind of cartoony, kind of cutesy, kind of grotesque. There are a lot of recurring motifs, like monsters, hands, flowers, clouds, fences, the paint brush, sports iconography... A lot of the motifs in my work are born out of spending time in the sketchbook, working kind of automatically and looking for the things that keep popping up. Those things make their way into paintings pretty naturally. That blue creature has a pretty consistent presence in my work. He is a character that provides a narrative thread to an otherwise pretty non-sensical world. When I started painting him, one of my friends was like “oh he’s like Gossamer from Looney Tunes!”. I didn’t know who they were talking about, but went back and watched episodes of Looney Tunes with Gossamer and concluded I had either been influenced by this character as a kid or that the archetype of a dim witted, cute monster character was always interesting to me. His hands are sort of characters of their own. For example, I made a series of paintings of these blue hands destroying daises in various ways. By just including his hands in the paintings it sort of helped me engage with a narrative about compulsion, self-defeat and destruction in a way that wasn’t too didactic. The paintings could be these spaces where I could use the materials to hold my attention on these things in a prolonged way. Most of my work has some element of humor, maybe through some of those aesthetic qualities I mentioned above like cuteness or cartooniness, that provides an air of levity or optimism to more troubling aspects of the human condition.

Stone Age Stick Up Kid, oil on canvas, 39 x 52 in.

SC: Tell us about your creative process. How does the creation of an artwork begin and end?

DB: Most of my paintings start with a real bad sketch from my imagination of what I’m trying to describe and then I’m just making successively clearer iterations of that bad sketch, sometimes introducing external references, sometimes not. I do as much preliminary work as I need to get something going. I do want to know quite a bit about an image before I start painting it, like drawing and composition, color, light etc... When I’m painting I want to primarily be thinking about the way paint is being applied to the surface, thinness vs thickness, opacity vs transparency, mark... All those material specific things. Naturally, all those things about the image I thought I had figured out change with the painting, but I do like to exhaust what I can before I’m dealing with things at scale. I want to think as much as possible before I get to the painting process, so then the painting process can be kind of cathartic. I think paintings end when that catharsis is over and I can stop thinking about the painting when I’m not with it.

SC: Are there specific rituals or routines you follow when starting a new project?

DB: I think making or prepping a surface is a nice ritual in the early stages of building a painting. I used to dread making surfaces because there is this pressure building where you don’t know what’s going to happen when you actually get to painting. I guess I just thought of it as an inconvenient chore. Now I just think of it as part of the painting process, and part of the painting process that has a really clear goal, unlike just about every other aspect of painting!

Tripping Into Third, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in. 

SC: Describe your studio or workspace. What are the three objects/items that have to be there always, no matter what?

Dana Blume's studio

DB: I have been working out of a few different studios over the past couple of years. My personal studio is quite cozy (small) but I have a long wall where I can work on a few medium size projects at once. I am lucky enough to have friends with space I can use when I’m working on a larger projects. I always like having a some kind of cart with wheels, a glass palette, a palette knife. Pretty conventional stuff. I really love the studio though. I love seeing how other peoples studios operate. It’s such a special place.

SC: Describe your favorite artwork made by an artist you admire. Why is it your favorite work?

DB: A painting that has always stuck with me through the years is Pierrot by Watteau. I’ve only seen reproductions of the painting so I can’t speak much on my interest with Watteu as a painter but that image is so odd and full of character. It’s a portrait of a pantomime from the Comedia Del Arte in a landscape surrounded by other stock characters. I love the expression of the sad clowns face staring directly at us, isolated amongst a group of odd characters engaged in something together. I am very attracted to the idea of a sad pitiful protagonist, like the blue creature in my work, as opposed to a hero. I think my interest in an archetype like that it is one of the main driving forces behind the imagery that I paint.

SC: Describe your favorite artwork and why you think it stands out. (from your own production, not of other artists)

DB: I made a painting in early 2023 called ‘Preemptive Strike’ that I think about a lot still. The image of the painting depicts that blue hand lighting these cherry bombs to blow up a flower in this abstract field that sort of looks like sky or thrashing ocean. I was utilizing alot of direct and indirect painting techniques in a single painting for the first time. There were these moments of shimmery transparency and moments where the material were really sitting on the surface. Something about the way the materials were behaving was kind of overwhelming for me (in a positive way), but I do think the textual elements of the image got kind of lost to the audience. I got a lot of positive feedback about appearance of the painting, which I am so thankful for, but it always bothered me that the subject matter got kind of buried in the paint.

I recently revisited the image for a mural project here in Seattle. In preparation for that project, I made a reproduction of the image using latex house paint on Arches oil paper, just to get a sense of how that paint behaves. It ended up having a clarity that I think the initial iteration was missing. I think it was something about how that material, industrial latex paint, is not designed to be materially “beautiful”. It is designed to flatten itself and cover everything and be absolutely uniform. Something about that limitation helped me be a lot more descriptive about the subject matter and really think about formal elements in a much more abstract, less physical way. I was also really pleased that when I was painting outside on the actual mural, many people expressed an interest in the way it was being painted but there was a lot more comments about the subject matter and how it made them feel.

Preemptive Strike, acrylic on Arches oil paper, 22 x 30 in.

SC: How has technology impacted your artistic process, if at all? Are there any new tools or technologies that you find particularly exciting or influential in the art world?

DB: Sometimes I’ll use an iPad to plan compositions. It’s really nice to be able to take a sketch and use a tool that mimics opaque paint and really play around with shapes and expand and contract the frame of the image really quickly. Sometimes I’ll use it to make some notes about color but I’m typically using physical materials to think about color. The amount of color you have at your fingertips with the iPad is kind of overwhelming when I’m trying to plan something, it scrambles my brain a little bit... I like the limitations of a physical color pallet but the iPad is a great place for me to think monochromatically and really move elements of an image around pretty instantaneously. For about a total of two seconds, I tried using AI to help me generate images of blue hands with long black finger nails doing really specific things and it turns out the one thing AI is really bad at is producing hands engaged in even the most simple gestures... So that was a very short lived attempt to use that technology to help generate imagery for paintings.

SC: What is a dream project that you have not started yet but you’d love to realize?

DB: I would really like to work on a very large scale mural. My main focus will always be in the studio making my work, but there is something very captivating about the monumentality you can achieve working outside on existing structures. I guess the biggest issue is I would really only be interested in making a 6 story painting if I had complete creative control over the whole thing and didn’t have to answer to anyone about subject matter, color, materials... This is obviously a very naive attitude considering you have to have so much experience to get these projects and I have very little experience. So it definitely exists as a kind of dream that may or may not ever be actualized but it is fun to think about!

SC: If you weren’t an artist, what would you do?

DB: Maybe I’d be a carpenter? I guess I would probably want to make a career out of something that involves working with my hands. To be honest, I think I would be pretty lost if I wasn’t an artist. Working in the studio really stimulates something in my brain I can’t stimulate elsewhere, something that has to be stimulated for me to feel even. I really don’t know what I would do!

Installation view