Painting: The Yummies

Last weekend my boss went to Denver for a wedding. While he was out there he met an artist. The artist goes by the name Donut David and runs a website called The Yummies. I dug a little deeper and found that Donut David has an Etsy store. The profile on the store says the following:

“Our motto is ‘Art and Peanut Butter.’

The Yummies is a full time collective that does art about the joys of life otherwise known as ‘Peanut Butter.’

We started in 2003 doing paintings, clothes and performances.”

I’m a little confused about how to separate Donut David from The Yummies. For character profiles on The Yummies see this link.

From what my boss could tell, Donut David used to be a tagger. At some point in recent years he became a Christian and began painting instead of vandalizing. The only other thing my boss could tell me was that he actually makes a living, apparently, selling his paintings. His works are for sale on The Yummies website and Etsy; see his MySpace page here.

His current work is a massive series of small cartoon-like dogs:

His use of mixed media is nice and the series’ consistancy is commendable. The layering on the surface is dynamic in some of the paintings. However, I still don’t empathize with work that so openly displays marks that more or less look like undeveloped craft. The dogs look like southern preacher folk art with a big city sensibility; the result is something like pop art without the precision of a Warhol or Lichtenstein.

Is it difficult to take serioulsy the art of someone who’s motto is openly “Art and peanut butter?”