Danne DeBacker’s Compulsive Creativity

When you walk into Danne Debacker’s house, you might think, “this man is compulsively creative”.

Danne and his "Cube Eater"

For example, he replaced the door to his studio with one that looks like the opening of a submarine. He invents wacky games like the “cube eater.” It’s a cube with a big toothy mouth.  Kids toss numbered cubes into the mouth and learn how to add. When he turned nine his birthday present was a series of traditional Japanese watercolors lessons. He has homemade trains and guitars all over his house.

His paintings, featured in the “Old West, New West” exhibit at the Karen Wray Fine Art Gallery maintain this sense of fun. He calls them “landscape stories.” Titles like Jemez Mountain Brook Shark and Vision of Victory hint at the narrative in the painting. He makes his own frames, because it saves him time and money and adds value and character to the paintings.

A lot of Debacker’s art is commercial – logos and website design. But he also has a knack for accidentally making things that people feel compelled to buy.

In the seventies, he moved to New Hampshire to help his stepfather who had just had a heart attack. They were hanging sheetrock in a building that used to be a hardware store, and he was annoyed because people were looking into the windows at them all the time.

His solution? He built a model train set with foam to put in the window as a Christmas decoration.  That way people wouldn’t look at them while they worked.

It was a small town and his train set was a big hit. People kept stopping to look at it and it was on the front page of the paper. He wondered if he could sell it.

He was just reaching into the window to put a $500 price tag up when a guy, jogging by, knocked on the window and said, “Can I write you a check right now?”

When he showed the check to his wife and she told him to make more train sets!

He had to.  The jogger went home to get his car and DeBacker left the price tag in the window. Within hours six people were ready to buy a train set.

In his current home he needed a place to put his lawnmower, so rather than build a regular shed, he built a plywood train caboose and painted it green. As soon as he was finished, a guy screeched to a halt in front of his house and said, “That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.  How much is it?”

Even though he just needed a place to put his lawnmower he ended up selling three train sheds for $1,500 apiece.

He’s always been creative, but he argues that creativity isn’t something that you’re born with. “Being able to create art is not a matter of talent,” he said. “It’s something that you learn to do.”

Meet Danne DeBacker at the opening reception for “Old West, New West,” from 5-7 PM on Friday, April 29 at the Karen Wray Fine Art Gallery, 2101 Trinity Drive, Suite B-2. His paintings will be on exhibit, along with the work of Tim Althauser, Cindy Valdez, Kathy Hjeresen and Connie Pacheco. 2101 Trinity Drive, Suite B-2.

Tim Althauser's New Life as an Artist

On April 29th from 5-7pm Karen Wray Fine Art Gallery will have a reception for their exhibit, "Old West, New West," featuring the works of local artists Tim Althauser, Danne DeBacker, Cindy Valdez, Connie Pacheco and Kathy Hjeresen. 

“It feels like I’ve won the lottery every time I sell a painting… and now it’s happening more and more often,” said Nambé painter, Tim Althauser.

He recently sold a painting to a collector in Dallas and a big painting to another collector in San Francisco. He has ten paintings in the Downey Gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, and he may have already sold the half-finished painting on his easel.

It’s no surprise that his work is so popular. He captures the liberated feeling you get when you’re out in nature, gazing up at the sky and listening to the breeze in the leaves. The aspens in his paintings are incredibly lifelike and realistic; you would think he has spent his entire life staring up at trees . . .

 . . . And the fact is, he has. Before becoming an artist, Althauser cut timber and built log houses in Arizona and Colorado for over 15 years.

Then at the age of 38 he suffered a severe brain hemorrhage. He had to learn to walk and take care of himself. Nevertheless, he returned to work within a few months, trying to work as hard as he always had. He simply didn’t know what else to do with his life.

With the encouragement and support of his new wife, Loretta, he was able to make the transition to a new life as an artist.

In 2003, Althauser and his friend David Davila (a chainsaw artist who got him into painting after he had his brain hemorrhage) were eating lunch at Maria’s, in Santa Fe, when he met Loretta. “I noticed a lady across the room. We looked at each other. We smiled.  And then she got up and ran out of the restaurant!”

“He was looking at me and I was getting so uncomfortable,” said Loretta, who had abandoned her meal because she was feeling so bashful. 

“I had nowhere else to look!” protested Althauser. A month later, she was his waitress at another restaurant, and couldn’t “run off”.  They’ve been together ever since.

When Loretta found out that he was teaching himself to paint she insisted that he quit building log homes, and paint.

He started with cowboy boots and churches, but found that he could put so much more into his art when he painted what he knew: trees. He has spent so much time in the woods he doesn’t even have to look at a tree to paint one. “With leaves, without leaves, it really doesn’t matter.”

If you look close, unexpected colors like lapis lazuli and genuine malachite are threaded through the trunks of his trees. He said, “My paintings aren’t abstract, but there are a lot of colors that don’t belong there, but it enhances the beauty.”

“I wouldn’t be an artist if it weren’t for my wife, Loretta,” said Althauser. “I didn’t know if I could pull it off or if I could do it.  Having Loretta say ‘I think you could sell it’ made all the difference. It’s stunning to have someone who believes in you.”