Artist: David Pollat
Website: davepollot.com
Country: Rochester, USA
About the artist (from his website): My story didn’t really get interesting until 2010, when I met a quirky young lady named Becca. Becca loved (still does) nothing more than to shop at thrift stores, and very often, she’d drag me along with her. On one such trip, we joked about how fun it would be to paint funny things into some of the more (or less) interesting pieces of abandoned thrift art. We laughed this off until about a week later when Becca returned home from a thrift shop excursion with a painting. I was instantly hooked.
how fun it would be to paint funny things into… abandoned thrift art… I was instantly hooked.
Before I began repurposing discarded thrift art, I painted more “serious” architectural paintings and landscapes. While I loved this, I found that I got bored very quickly (which resulted in about three completed paintings a year). Bringing new life to old art, though, brings interesting challenges with each new piece. I try to make my “additions” (which are often references to and parodies of my favorite movies and video games) look as though they were there the entire time. With a world so full of serious questions, I’m just trying to let viewers laugh as they construct their own narrative from some new oil paint humorously added to some old, neglected bit of Americana.
Using only a brush and some paints, artist David Pollat inserts Pop Culture icons into long abandoned paintings he finds in thrift stores. Not only do the new characters seem strangely at home in their new locations, they also look adequately aged and seamlessly blend in with the age of the paintings, a compliment to the artists abilities. One cannot help but find them all the more beautiful because of these additions.
