Friday, March 25, 2011

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.




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