Danny Cole (Nov. 2019)
Walking towards Danny’s studio, knowing we were going to sit and converse, I panicked. The odd thing is that nothing about Danny, or conversations like these, is intimidating. It was just a weird wave of anxiety that caused a thousand questions to overtake all available brain cells. After a couple failed attempts, Drake and I found the apartment he said he lived at, but struggled to find a way to ring that we’d arrived. Just at that moment, when panic was at its peak, Danny’s face appeared at the corner of the window with its ever-present ear-to-ear smile.
His presence brought a calm not felt the entire trip towards the apartment. From that moment, there was a level of connectivity which stayed omnipresent throughout our time together. He came and opened the front door, welcoming us to where he lived and worked, glowing with an aura around his very being. Though, more than his workspace, we were entering Danny’s mind and The Creature World entire.
The truth is, Danny is as open of an individual as you’ll ever meet. His heart is sewn into his sleeve. Within himself, he holds a deep respect for the emotions and lives of others. He accepts the power of connectivity and utilizes it within his every word, action, and most of all, within his every project and painting. It’s truly his mission to see humans hand in hand, listening when needed and speaking freely when required.
He specifically achieves this through The Creature World. His own creation, The Creature World is a land of emotional democracy inhabited by the subjects of his paintings. It is a lens that he works to give others the opportunity to see life through. It is a philosophy, a truthful reflection of self and a place to exist when the world is overwhelming. By painting The Creature World, he breathes life into its every inhabitant and shares the joyous power existent in the space. By dedicating himself to bringing the world alive, he is dedicating himself to the good in humanity and the love residing within us all.
Danny is a rare artist who can recognize the weight of their actions in real-time. As he creates, he watches his inner vision come to life as every dazed soul finds a home. He knows it’s something bigger than him or any single canvas; it’s about all of us, it’s all our lives all at once. It’s about emotional legitimacy through times of falsehood and it’s having empathy in days where it feels not a single heart can spare any. The human experience is, after so long burnt out, becoming reignited once again by his work, infectious love and vision for us all.
I walked towards his apartment panicking but left feeling more hopeful for our collective future than I ever had. Not an ounce of negativity could penetrate the armour he equipped me with during our time together. He sent me back out in the world a little taller than when I’d left it. Very rarely does anything leave us with such an afterglow, but Danny and his world do. He is sharing his golden aura piece by piece, illuminating the world entire and making it more so stunning than it had ever been.
Looking into your life, when did you realize that there was something special and worth pursuing with your art?
I know the exact moment. I wasn't really showing my artwork to anyone at the time; I was just making it almost as a form of therapy, a means of arriving at an understanding for myself. But this one night during high school, Duckwrth was throwing a party. Of course, I went. I was painting on the walls at the party and this dude named Channel Tres, who's now doing so well but at the time had no music released, chased me out of the party. He was like, “yo, people inside are talking about your art, you should stay”, and I was like, “my art? I don’t know, it’s a school night, my mom’s going to be angry at me and I need to get back to Watchung.” He kept saying I needed to stay around a bit. So I said, “alright, I’ll deal with my mom being angry at me.” Eventually, this guy came up to me asking if I sell my work and I said, “yeah, of course, I sell my work”, but I hadn’t even been showing my work around yet. That night, I remember walking home with my friend Jake, both chatting and realizing that I could do something by sharing my artwork. As soon as the idea was planted in my head, it just stuck.
I want to go back to what you were saying before we started recording about a new generation being defined. I'm not saying this is good or bad, but I'm saying based on the patterns that I'm seeing in the art representative of our time, I think we’re moving, in the ’20s, towards an era that I would consider, without giving it a proper title, a sort of surreal minimalism. You look into music or visual arts stemming from the ’70s and the mentality was ‘more is more’. People were embracing this larger-than-life essence. Think of the Wall of Sound, you hear endless layers of instrumentation to the point you don't know what you’re hearing. Now, we’re seeing our content increasingly stripped down. You’re only getting exactly what is needed to get the message across. Soon, I think we will need less and less. Then, when you look at the actual messages being shared, the content we are consuming is drifting farther and farther from being representative of the lives we live. It’s in our music, our humour, our memes...
Well, even I feel that with the interviews I’ve done, not to bring it back to me here.
Bring it back to you.
I don't want to do it with a gimmick, I want to make the conversations true and important. I don’t want it to be video content. It only needs people’s language. You just need people’s words and to bring back true dialogue again.
Absolutely.
Our language, even the way we talk as humans, has devalued.
Though, I also don't feel qualified to blame people about this.
Of course not, it’s not their fault.
I think this surrealism people practice has seeped into our lives specifically through the humour people use as a coping mechanism. We’re in uncertain and scary times; times where, as you said, there's no way to know what's going to happen. I mean, if you actually look and sit back, kids are getting murdered every day, kids are in cages right now. I mean I could go on, but nothing seems real.
It all feels like a big dream.
I think the only way for people to not let it drive them crazy is to experience life as if nothing is real. That's kind of what this whole Creature World is, to be honest. It's experiencing reality in the purest form through the lens of imagination; that's what I try to make with my art. I know I can't control people's perception, but I can control what I feed them. A lot of the art that I make, and the way I approach it, is creating something that can guide people toward a mirror. It also feels really good to have an escape. I feel people need the ability to step away from this world in a non-permanent manner.
To bring it back outside of these times and this current wave of art, what is your best childhood memory and why does it stick out to you as a primarily positive one?
I keep going back to when my mom gave me the Taylor guitar she owned for many years. Even though I had my hands on a different guitar beforehand, and I grew up playing drums and different music, having something I felt so honoured to be playing was monumental. A Taylor is as good as it can get; holding and hearing how effortlessly the sound came out is what stuck with me. I gained an understanding that I want to make it as easy as possible for myself to create. To live my life in such an amazing order that the only thing left to be sporadic is the thoughts in my head. It's difficult to see in the studio right now because I have so many materials out after passing out on the couch last night. But, 95 out of a hundred nights, before I go to bed, I clean my entire room and know exactly where everything is. That way, when I wake up in the morning, I don't even have to think about where things are or have my head caught with something else to handle first. It just gets me in the mode of, “I have everything in front of me that I need to get my thoughts out, now let's just get them down.”
Have you ever thought about being like Steve Jobs and wearing the same thing every day just to remove another layer?
Yeah, I have started to transition my closet to less and less and less clothing while keeping those clothes to being these very high-quality basics that feel good to wear. Like this shirt that I'm wearing right now is cut and sew Japanese fabric that has been constructed in New York. It's reaching a point where I'm able to just grab any piece and they all go together, but it's just the basics.
And I'm guessing you still feel an expression in the basics and transmitting yourself through that?
Absolutely, the only clothes I truly love are basics.
Coming out of school you came to New York to fully immerse yourself in art. Why did you feel you had to move to New York and what did you find here that wasn't existent before?
My town had a population of 5000 people. Let's say I was able to get every single person in my town to be the biggest fan of me, that’s still smaller than the fanbase I have in New York. Not only that, but I just wasn’t happy where I grew up. It’s not that I love every aspect of New York, but the city is so big that the stuff I do love exists within arms reach. You have access here.
What were the biggest challenges for you when you moved to New York and what wasn't easy in that transition between cities?
Well, I remember packing up a U-Haul with all my belongings and driving it to where we're sitting currently, not knowing anybody in New York. I didn't have internet or reception, so I just sat on my apartment floor, which was not set up, thinking, “damn, what the fuck did I get myself into.” But at the same time, I didn't say to myself that it was scary. I knew the moment that I was to say I didn't know what I was doing, I wouldn’t be able to get anybody else to think that I did. And when that happens, you really don't know what you're doing. I had to go from my state of a kid pretending to be an adult to actually learning how to be an adult. If you don't look out for yourself when you fall, you can’t count on anyone catching you. I don’t want to live in that risk.
Do you feel with your art a sense of responsibility to take people out of the digital age and to take things back to a more human experience instead of an online one?
I don't feel qualified to comment on what I feel other people should do with their art. If there's a person that has no way to share their story without the internet, then the internet is empowering. But there's a lack of personalization that occurs on the internet. You're not seeing people, you're just seeing a lot of faces. There's a missing link that doesn't register. I focus on bringing people together in person, but I can’t do any of that without the internet. How am I going to get people to know where the shows are?
How are you able to bridge the two worlds and do you feel you can use experimentation to be your vessel?
Yeah, I feel my approach to the internet is a lot more keeping people in the loop with what's happening in person. But to do that, it’s important to make art that can be consumed primarily on the internet. I don't think it's a burden because not everybody lives in New York and not everybody can live in New York. I truly appreciate the ability to make art that can reach people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to see it. I think where things get twisted is when people live their whole lives on the internet because it’s sometimes hard not to.
How would you say as an artist you find yourself going down new avenues and what tools and methodologies do you use to supplement your art?
It's never really choosing an avenue or medium first or saying, “this is what I want to try.” It's more finding a problem and seeing what I can do to get a solution. I feel like I spend most of my time just trying to see how I can bring The Creature World to life. The ultimate goal is whether I can step into The Creature World and live there with everyone forever.
For someone who doesn't know, what is the proper description of The Creature World?
The Creature World is a universe inhabited by a species of nearly identical-looking creatures which are the subjects of my work. They simply experience. It’s nice to just observe them without having to calculate decisions. I try to create art and experiences around The Creature World that allow people to experience the act of observing with me. There is so much to learn from how we feel about our own projected explanations to The Creature World. For me, there is an added level to learn from where the visions come from in the first place. In this case, the creature in this painting [pointing to the piece on the easel], there's this dome of colour and the creature is seemingly trying to pull it so tight that it becomes part of it. Why would that make anyone feel good or bad? Why would that make anyone feel anything? It’s about association. What you feel is about you. It’s not about the creature. Early this year, I spent a few months where I was trying to take immersion into The Creature world to the next level, so I started doing intensive studies on altered states of consciousness, like lucid dreaming, learning how to induce a person into a dream state. There was a goal of getting together a group of people and implanting The Creature World in their head to experience a personalized vision.
In these experiments, did you come to new realizations and ultimately were you able to implant The Creature World?
I believe in the understanding that our existence is so much more vast and complicated than we are capable of comprehending and that there's a lot more that we can do to elevate our understanding. After a lot of experimentation and trials to guide people, I started gathering groups together and got to a point where I could get one person into the state, but the others were having trouble understanding each other's experiences. In the end though, I did it for everyone together and it was amazing. I got a group together in this warehouse in Long Island City. It was a whole day of experiencing The Creature World in silence in all of our heads together. All I did was form the creature in their heads and then let each mind take it from there. After that day together, I never felt as alone. I never felt the need to do it again. I will do it again at some point, but I got what I needed from it and have moved on currently.
On top of that, you also have talked to me about how you created a 7-course meal experience along with your art. What was that presentation and how did it come together?
All of the experiences I design are focused on immersing people in The Creature World and to bring everyone even closer together. You’re referring here to A Battle For Harmony, the dinner experience I did with chef Jake Hetnarski. He has this unique approach to food where he seeks to personify flavour. He had written to me, I invited him over, we had spoken and what I had asked him was whether we could design dishes that were able to solicit curated physical reactions. He said yes, so we got to working out how to pair a meal with a story, using flavour to guide people through the story. So, for example, there's a type of Szechuan peppercorn, I believe it's from Japan, and when you eat that peppercorn it contains a natural numbing agent. It's often used in dishes where you need your mouth to be somewhat numb or else the flavour would be too powerful. We incorporated all kinds of things like that into the meal and designed the dishes to correspond in chronological order with the story of the creature I was telling. I think it opened so many doors for comprehension. I thought the best compliment I ever received came that night from this dude who came up to me after the show, he’s a very mythical figure in New York, he came up to me and said, “this made me understand art.”
Through The Creature World, what questions do you feel can be answered and what becomes clear when existing there?
I think the beautiful thing is that The Creature World is not my creature world, it's everyone's creature world. The same questions and answers exist in this world. The Creature World is just an alternative lens that might make them easier to decipher. I'm a big believer in the universal nature of emotion. I think to enter this world through a shared lens where everyone is the creature is a reminder that you’re not alone in your experiences. Whatever you’re feeling right now is shared by a person right in front of you. They’re able to comprehend what you’re going through.
A lot of this creature world and your art, and correct me if I’m wrong, it seems to be made for people to find an understanding of self. Or is there a different goal with it beyond that notion?
I think that is the overarching goal. We can’t do this alone and it’s easier to do it together. I like to make things I need. I think anything I need, others probably could use too. I have some other stuff I'd love to delve into, so if you have a question right now please feel free to go ahead.
No, for sure, what is it?
I think it's everything we’re talking about right now. I have my head still on what New York is looking like right now.
For sure, yeah, this generation and all the confusion with it.
I think we are on the cusp of something. This is the first time in my life where I've said to myself, “I don't know what's going on.” And I can’t put into words what's going on to myself even, but I've got a feeling that there's something here.
Something special right? Do you also get the sense that this is a once in a generation spark? This is a bolt of lightning in a bottle moment that hasn't happened this way and is something that will define the next generation going forward.
I just hope that no one gets too exhausted. Something is going on and it would just suck for anyone to miss feeling it develop. I can’t tell you what it is, but I'm leaning into it and I'm not going to rest until I’m in the center of it. But realize it’s not just the artists that are excited about this, everybody's anticipating. Everybody’s ready for a change. It’s a little scary.
I feel as someone who’s been, I guess, journalizing a lot of it, I can't even describe what it is. But it's an underlying thread of connectivity. I'm going to pose a thought to you and you can just go off and respond to it. But a lot of times what we’ve talked about is this word ‘sonder’. It's a made-up word but I’ll give you the definition: “The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it”. So, we feel that this is sonder and we are in this together.
It makes you feel smaller.
But it is the realization that something is going on and something bigger is here. It’s this human connectivity that we feel.
I just watched this video on optimistic nihilism and it was about how the cruellest joke on humanity is that we've come to a point where we can see the world is so much bigger than us, but also that we’re at a point where we can realize what we're experiencing is kind of a side plot and we're not big enough to do anything about it.
A couple of friends and I were talking about this fun theory that life’s kind of a video game.
I believe it.
Like certain people are NPC’s and certain people are central characters.
Are you trying to talk about simulation theory?
Do you feel we’re in a simulation?
I can't tell you that we're not, and I have some pretty easy ways to explain it. So the other day, and I'm not a believer in God or religion for context, I'm sitting here trying to do a bunch of work with the whole team and my doorbell rings. I wasn't expecting anyone, but it could be a delivery, so I went to my doorbell, answer and see these two people. The one says, “Hi my name is Jessica I'm here with Carol, we’re from the church of Jehovah and we'd love to talk about…”, and of course I say, “thank you but I am so incredibly not interested, but have a good day”, and I hang up the doorbell. I go back over and a friend of mine asks who's at the door and I said they’re Jehovah's Witness. She tells me that we should invite them in, I say okay, walk outside and say for them to come in. So we had Jessica, who’s probably late 30s, and Carol, who's an 87-year-old lady, sit down here and watch a documentary on evolution. They watched it all and then they said, “this just proves God even more”, and Carol asked around if anyone understand the movie at all. She said that if you're in a house, somebody had to put it there, and if you're in a world someone had to put the world there and so on. But that’s when I ask, “who put God there, Carol?”
Would you say your overarching philosophy is nihilism?
No, I wouldn't even say I know enough about nihilism to speak on it. Just to go back, they keep telling me about how it has to be God during which I ask them if they've heard of simulation theory. They ask about it and I tell them about it in the easiest way I can. Let’s look at the path of video games. Not too long ago when my dad was younger, it was just Pong where you have two rectangles and a ball that bounces between them, that was as realistic as it could get. But every year they look more and more real until we're getting to a point where it's difficult to see whether we're looking at CGI or something real. Also on top of getting realistic, we're killing our planet and reaching a point where, in the foreseeable future, our planet will not be able to sustain life as we know it. So, we have two options when that time comes: are we going to die out or we going to adapt? And knowing the will to live and the drive that we’d have to keep our species alive, we're going to have to adapt. Now, what form will that be, I can’t tell you exactly, but what I can say is that if we have the option to transfer our conscience into a new form, something electric, or die, I think we would go for putting ourselves in a computer. A lot of patterns in our world seem to be related with limitations existent in code. If you look at the mathematical spirals of stars, it's identical to the spirals of shells at the bottom of the ocean. If you look down to the numbers of petals on flowers, the numbers just keep on being reused. It's literally as if code is reused. The limitations in video games, we see it now as scientific limitations in our real world but it's all consistent with the simulation theory. But is that the only option? No. The truth is that I don't know. And should you even care? No. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter because whether we are in a simulation or not, whether we are living in a world of God and something that God made. It doesn't matter because we are here regardless and we can spend all of our time trying to figure out why we are here, what is this word and make no progress, literally no progress.
And it doesn't matter to you to figure out a larger scheme that may overrule the universe?
No, to me it’s just wasting your time. It's possible, anything's possible, but if we gave the same time to things that we can make a concrete amount of progress on, like art and science, think how far we would go. These things are beyond the understanding of humanity and what if instead, we say, “I'm not qualified to tell what we’re in, but I can tell you I think we can do better while we're here.” I can make progress by saying let's do better.
Though through all this, if there's a simulation theory and all these problems with the world and everything going on, why dedicate yourself to art and why dedicate yourself to painting?
Because it's not about work and painting. I’ve never taken an art class and I only used a paintbrush for the first time three months ago, I was drawing with markers before and then foam brushes and sponges on wooden sticks. It's not about the medium, it’s about expression, it's about creating an environment that I want to make and that other people want to live in that, in the end, we can live in together. It's making the most of what we're in and trying to make it the best it can be.
It's like we talked about this being an aimless generation and all of us being in this together and just trying to make the existence more bearable.
And you can't do it alone, that's where I went wrong in the past. I thought I wanted to do it alone because, in the past, I felt a strong disconnect. I didn't want to waste my energy trying to be on the same page as other people, I just wanted to be on the same page as myself. But pretty soon you realize, “why the fuck am I sharing my art if it’s not connecting with others?” If you have the people around you, why not work with them?
Have you gotten to a point where you almost say, “I don't care and the only thing that matters is expression and existing with happiness.”
No way, a lot of things matter. There's no reason to make things harder than they have to be, so I'm not saying to just throw it all away. People need to have jobs and function together. It takes all of us to have the world we have, but let's not make it harder than it has to be.
What do you think, coming in the next year, is your single most concrete goal and the most important thing for you to achieve?
I'm going to be a part of it. Like we talked about, having that scene in New York that at one point left. But the culture is on its way back. I hope it doesn't sound egotistical, but I don't know anybody else who's bringing a scene back in the same way that my collaborators and I are.
You want to build something here that is larger than any of us, something that stands beyond this era and our lifetime.
Listen man, I got 600 people together to listen to a story about this creature and then two nights ago we put on something called Le Vin Rouge. The night was an exploration of experiencing grief through an open lens. To say, “instead of dwelling on loss, look at all of the room we have just made for something new.” Matt Shultz from Cage the Elephant has experienced more concrete loss than I have through some personal situations. He called me and said, “let’s throw a show in four days.” So we brought all of these people together and I prepared a performance piece involving this big wooden panel where I was going to paint a picture. I went up there with Matt and the moment the paint touched the canvas, I just had a sudden moment of clarity that everything was wrong. I pressed the paint on the canvas and I just kept pressing harder until it was ruined. There's no cleaning paint live once you touch the canvas. It was supposed to be a live creation, but instead, I took the rest of the three canvases on the floor and I ruined them all. I just covered them in paint and, when I didn't feel like I can ruin them by myself, I grabbed handfuls of paint and just kept putting more in people's hands and telling them to destroy the paintings until all the canvases turned brown. Then I freaked out and started screaming. I got everyone close and I just spoke with them and explained that “I wanted to make a clean painting and have my picture speak to reclamation, but I can't always do this. There are times when we get too exhausted and it's nice to have a bunch of people around you where you can all just lean into the apocalypse together. We're all in the same boat, so thank you guys for sharing this moment with me.” We took control back together. Then I went to the green room and I wanted to cry because I didn't get to make the painting that I wanted to and it was my fault because I couldn’t get it together. When I went back up there I heard all these people talking about the show and saying that it was incredible. I realized it wouldn’t have been about the painting either way.
That is just unreal, the whole show of energy and emotion. To leave off, do you have any final ideas or notions you hope to put out in the world?
I'm ready. I’m learning still, but I’m okay with that. I spent this year making sure that I could keep my head up and I'm going to have to spend a lot of time still keeping my head up, but I’m more ready than I have ever been.
All photos by Drake Li