Bending classics, pop culture
Painter finds fun niche by adding characters to old landscape paintings
“True life is lived when tiny changes occur,” Leo Tolstoy once said.
If that's true, then artist and vintage store owner David Sherrill is living one heck of an existence.
The Ohio-based creator has found a niche adding pop-culture characters to old landscape paintings.
You'll find, for instance, R2-D2 and some AT-AT Walkers from Star Wars facing off near a lighthouse. Or Xena, warrior princess, and her partner posed lakeside in front of a mountain. Sherrill has also inserted characters from Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Netflix's Tiger King and other fandoms to a variety of Bob Ross-like scenes.
Now there are roughly 40 paintings priced at US$20 on the website for Arrowhead Vintage & Handmade Goods in Canton, Ohio (arrowheadcanton.com/altered-art). But it all started with an old piece of art in Sherrill's store that he just couldn't sell.
“After two years I thought, `Well, it's taking up space. I might as well just throw it away. And if I'm going to throw it away, I might as well try and do something interesting with it.' So I added a couple of Star Wars figures,” he told Insider.
The piece sold, and Sherrill added Godzilla to another painting. That piece sold, too.
At first, Sherrill sourced original paintings at auctions, thrift stores, and street corners, but he's since expanded his business to accept commissioned work.
“The response was rough very early on. Some people were very offended that I was taking a piece of art which, to some person who created it, might've been a sacred piece of art to them,” Sherrill said.
But he said he always tries to respect the original creation.
Sherrill's approach falls into the artistic tradition of appropriation, where creators use pre-existing objects or images in their art with little transformation of the original. It's a practice that inspired cubist collages in the early 1900s. “Everybody loves having fun,” Sherrill told Insider. “And I know this is not fine art ... So I don't mind doing it at a low price.”