The Charlotte Observer

Issue Date: September 21, 2003

Animal Magnetism

Offbeat pet portraits by creative cat in a hat are attracting national attention.
By: Mark Price

Mark Durham makes an unlikely celebrity. He sometimes works in his boxer shorts, unwinds by singing ballads to his two cats and hits a creative peak every morning about 3 a.m., while hopping over paintings in his garage.

Fame has found him nonetheless.

USA Today summed it up recently in a feature story that called Durham an innovator for successfully combining the styles of Vincent van Gogh, Salvador Dali and Peter Max into something zany and original. "Durham makes his living rendering ... colorful, whimsical ... high-end portraits," the article said.

With a twist.

Durham's paintings are of household pets. And something else: Most have mysterious images hidden in them. Little floating orbs that look like ... well, like ...

"Flying saucers," 37-year-old Durham volunteered with no prodding. "I'm convinced that 98 percent of the time, dogs are communicating with extraterrestrials and other paranormal things. Why else would they always be out there in the backyard barking at nothing?

"They sense things we can't, like UFOs."

A joke?

"I'm going to let you believe me, if you want to believe me."

Blame the cat

Durham was an unknown in the art world two years ago. Brutal, but true. He painted, but his religious scenes had more a cult following in Charlotte than mass appeal. A small cult it was.Then he painted a portrait of the family cat, Spooner Lee. It couldn't complain, so Durham exaggerated her personality with fat cheeks, a smug expression, a glittery tiara and a string of blue pearls.

"I didn't think it was special," he said, "but people seemed taken with how I had identified my cat with a human personality."

All his friends wanted a pet portrait too -- and their friends, and their friends' friends, until Durham found himself booked for months. Word of mouth then took his reputation national.

This year, he expects to do over 200 portraits, all of them impressions of other people's dogs, cats, rabbits, parrots, even chickens.

He's hired a marketing consultant. There's a Mark Durham Web site (www.markdurhamstudio.com) and a new line of framed prints, and negotiations are in the works to license his art for greeting cards, coffee cups, shower curtains.

"He's the next Andy Warhol," said Carolyn Powell, who has featured his work at Gallery 2 in Columbia, S.C.

"There's an edginess to his work. He has a way of getting personality on canvass that is fun and touches people. He makes you pay attention and reminds you why people collect art. I think he's really going places."

His prices certainly have. Durham's low end has gone from $125 to $450 a painting. The high end is $2,000, and that's with no guarantee of what it will look like.

"What I do is never just a painting of a cat," said Durham, who minored in art and majored in journalism at the University of Georgia.

"If people want that, they should get a digital picture of their cat. ... Any time you deal with an artist, you are taking a risk. Art is supposed to awaken the senses."

And nothing will awaken your senses quite like a $1,200 portrait of your cat, especially when it's purple and surrounded by UFOs and dancing flowers.

Behind every great artist ...

No one is more grateful that Durham has found his muse than his wife, Laurel, an analyst and consultant with a technology group.

Their two-year marriage is proof that opposites attract, even when it's comically painful.

"The first year we were married, I'd come home from work never knowing what to expect," she said. "He painted the hallway black, the garage purple and then one day I came home and he had painted the garage door with a scene of three robust naked women dancing with this odd little man in a hat.

"My first reaction was `Well, maybe it will look good when it's finished.' Then he told me it was finished. I was floored. I mean, he couldn't put clothes on them? I finally told him I didn't want neighbors to know us as the people with the naked women on their garage."

His oft-given excuse is that he needs a home that inspires him, provokes him, points a stern finger and says "Paint, you crazy daddy-o." So paint he has, creating such attention-grabbers as a four-wall, life-size mural in the dining room that Laurel describes as a Venetian castle on Mars.

"He wanted a life-size mural of the Last Supper," she said, "but I told him it might intimidate our dinner guests. I didn't want an oversized display of Christ and the disciples gazing at me every time I ate dinner."

Now that he's overloaded with commissions, she comes home confident that their house on Commonwealth Avenue will look vaguely familiar.

His success is destiny, she believes. From their first date, Laurel sensed a reckless creativity that she found exciting. It wasn't just his art. Everything about Mark was different. He cut onions with a plastic knife, used a blender with no lid, ate Velveeta with tofu and pinto beans. He even painted the cat's tail.

Granted, she didn't see it coming when he switched from Biblical scenes to dog portraits.

The two dated only 10 months before they got married. "Sometimes, you just know," she said, sounding more like her husband than she realizes.

My son the nut

To see Mark Durham at the apex of weirdness, catch him painting.The witching hour is 2 a.m., when he flips on the lights of his un-air-conditioned garage, spreads a dozen canvases on the concrete floor and begins painting several simultaneously. "That way," he said, "if I get stuck on one painting, I can move to another."

It's a habit he picked up while painting in his parents' attic in Americus, Ga., where he grew up in a family of three boys.

Mara Durham admits her oldest son is "a nut," but she says it in a loving, motherly way that implies being a nut is as good as being president.

There's never been a day in his life that he didn't want to be an artist, she said, nor a moment when he wasn't trying to pull a fast one.

"He has a great sense of humor, a tendency to exaggerate and a boundless imagination," said Mara Durham, an artist who does more traditional paintings.

"Once, he organized a `welcome home' party for his little brother, with balloons and banners saying `Welcome Home Jimmy.' Only his brother's name was Peter and he'd been two houses away, spending the night at a neighbor's house."

Mark was 9 at the time.

Since then, the only thing he's done that really surprised her was getting married. She never imagined that he'd find a woman who would be that understanding of his quirks.

"It's not just that he gets up in the middle of the night to paint," she said. "It's that he's sloppy. He didn't just get paint all over the floors and all over the walls of the attic. ... Everything had paint on it."

Pets won't pose

There's no such thing as getting pets to pose, so Durham uses photos to get an impression of the animal. Then he interviews the owners to put a personality with the image.

That's what sets his work apart in a crowded field that is more photo realistic than artistic. Several dozen artists offer pet portraits on the Internet, and most are devout realists who profitably paint within the lines.

Not Durham. He see characters, rather than animals, and he delivers his interpretation in broad, impatient strokes, with whirls of color, floating flowers, flashing orbs and satisfied expressions that suggest the pet has had a few martinis.

Great Danes turn into Elvis. Chickens wear tuxedos and smoke cigarettes. Rabbits hang out at the beach with parrots.

Durham has even agreed to mix the ashes of dead pets into his paints.

So far, no one has rejected a painting, though some have cried with joy.

"He gets the animal's essence," said art collector Robert Webb of Albany, N.Y., who is among Durham's clients. "He captures emotions like love, humor, sadness, sometimes even grief. He captures the intangible."

Including extraterrestrials and their spacecraft.

Just a phase

Durham makes no promise of sticking with pet portraits, even if it does make him rich.

In fact, he's already begun work on a new series, the first of which is finished and sitting in his garage. It involves people portraits, which you'd think would be more lucrative than pets.

But this is Mark Durham.

"It's going to be big women on the beach in bikinis, with black cats and UFOs," he said.

Yes, more UFOs.

Why, you wonder, doesn't he just paint aliens?

"I'm thinking that big ladies in bikinis who come out in public are extraterrestrials."

Where to See the Art

Mark Durham's work can be seen at the Sleepy Poet Antique Mall, 121 Freeland Lane, or the Bruegger's Bagel Bakery shops at Park Road Shopping Center and Cotswold Shopping Center.