Civil employees were buzzing as the Pikes Peak Arts Council hung his paintings in City Hall. A teddy bear using a skeletal pelvis as the basket of a hot air balloon. A Pez dispenser of prescription drugs. “Mouse 1” and “Mouse 2” — one living, one dead. Rumor has it one city council member called his artwork “obscene.”
“This stuff has a lot of skulls and some things you have to wrestle with, and so, to hang it in City Hall in the little waiting room where they had it, it was a little awkward,” said artist Dan Sampson. “They’d had some wonderful photographs up there from an amazing photographer, and it’s nice work. And then you get a five-foot skull in a dunce cap. It’s a little off the beaten path, I suppose.”
Though Sampson’s work is undeniably macabre, it’s also playful and surprisingly childlike. It’s not dissimilar to the artist himself, a deep-voiced bear of a man who revealed himself to be more teddy than grizzly as he pondered the rediscovery of childhood toys in a box in the attic.
“You open it up and you expect a couple of blankets and some things, and then there’s just a sad teddy bear on its side,” he described. “You breathed life into that thing at one time, and now, it’s no longer there? I just don’t believe that.”
Teddy bears appear as the subjects of many of Sampson’s paintings, but skeletons crop up far more often. The fixation stems from having metal implants inserted in his ankle after breaking his leg as a teenager.
“I always told my parents and my family that if I ever won the lottery, I was going to have them take my skeleton out, replace it with something, just so I could see my skeleton,” Sampson said. “I think it’d be really weird to see yourself in three-dimensional, real time.”
That wasn’t the only time the doctor’s office inspired Sampson’s work. Several pieces vent his frustration with the pharmaceutical industry, and the many years he spent being prescribed drug after failing drug.
“All I started to hear was, ‘We’re going to try this. If that doesn’t work, we’re going to try this. If that doesn’t work, we’re going to try this. You may get these side effects, but then we’ll go back to that if you do,’” Sampson recalled. “And all of a sudden, I’m playing ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ with medication.”
One of Sampson’s drug-related pieces depicts ants in line carrying medication, poking fun at how “We’re all like cattle through a doctor’s office.”
Sociopolitical commentary is a throughline in his work, but Sampson tries not to be heavy-handed.
“I don’t want to shove anything down anybody,” he joked. “You bring your fork and knife to the table, and then you eat what you will off the plate.”
Several of Sampson’s pieces borrow the reds, whites and blues of the American flag. Others offer twists on classic fairy tales, from a disheveled Humpty Dumpty with a carboard sign reading, “Will Fall 4 Food,” to three blind mice failing to sniff out cheese hidden behind a purse.
“If I have to imagine a lot of these difficult situations in the real capacity that most grown-ups do, I’d never get past anything. I’d never put pants on,” Sampson explained. “But if I can lock it through a Cinderella story, or maybe Humpty Dumpty’s not doing so hot, well, I can compartmentalize that and get over it.”
Without an extensive art education, Sampson isn’t sure what to call his style, but he likes to use the word “illustrative.” One viewer described it as “contemporary pop surrealism.” There’s also a sense of absurd humor in his storytelling that can’t be ignored.
Sampson’s initial gateway into art was the death of his great-grandmother and subsequent inheritance of a butter cookie tin full of oil paints, palette knives, ink pens, $1.25 “How to Draw” paperbacks and leatherbound books from correspondence art courses.
Sampson began holing himself up in a crawl space in the basement, teaching himself how to paint while listening to old records.
Aside from the art books, Sampson’s first teacher was Bob Ross. Unable to afford the official painting kits, he followed the video along using his secondhand oil paints and paint thinner. It was a mess, but he loved it.
Sampson’s love became even more serious while taking art classes from artist Floyd Tunson at Palmer High School.
“In high school, I didn’t have canvases and stuff. I would find s–t in the trash and take it to the art room and paint it,” Sampson said. “When [Tunson] taught me how to stretch a canvas for the first time, that was a game changer.”
In Sampson’s senior year, Tunson submitted him into the “Wunderkind” youth exhibit at the Business of Art Center (now the Manitou Art Center). At the opening reception, Tunson introduced him to Mary Mashburn, the former executive director of arts nonprofit Imagination Celebration. You may know her best as the fairy godmother waving a magic wand in the mural on the side of the Mountain Chalet building.
“I had a five- or six-foot garage door that I’d painted, a piece of Saran Wrap that I’d painted and a horse on a piece of poster board,” Sampson recalled. “Mary Mashburn purchased that damn horse painting from me that day, and she shook my hand and wanted to know about it.”
Mashburn’s kindness affected Sampson so deeply that he had to leave the reception after a mere 20 minutes.
That same year, Sampson and two friends applied to Parsons School of Design. Of the three, only Sampson was accepted, but the other two insisted on coming along with him. The day after graduation, the Sampson and his friends jumped into a 1978 Buick Electra and drove almost 2,000 miles to New York City.
Sampson quickly realized after visiting the admissions office that there was no way he could afford the cost of tuition.
He still remembers the bagel he ate that morning at a deli he was simply excited to be in. When asked if he wanted lox, Sampson agreed, having no idea what they were until he took a bite.
“I’m going, ‘Jeez, this is the worst bagel I’ve ever had,’” Sampson recalled. “I’ve got a fishy bagel. I’m at a coffee shop 2,000 miles away from home. And now, I’ve got to get a job.”
Sampson worked at a gallery in lower Manhattan in New York for a little over a year before returning home, where he landed a sales job at Sherwin-Williams. Although Sampson was selling paint, he rarely picked up the brush in his 22-year career. His job was high-stress, and while he excelled at it, he loathed it on the inside.
Towards the end of 2020, Sampson reached a breaking point and, with the support of his wife, quit his job. He now works at a flooring company with a flexible schedule, allowing him to spend Friday afternoons wandering up and down Tejon St. with his sketchbook, giving thanks whenever he passes by the mural of his fairy godmother, Mary Mashburn. A vital component of his artistic process, Sampson’s Friday ritual provides inspiration and rejuvenation, replacing some of the pills he used to rely on to survive.
“Nobody else sees how the sausage was made, but we all like to eat it. So, when I look at artwork, now that I’m doing this more and more and more, I try to remain conscientious of what they’re doing, how they’re making the sausage,” Sampson said. “There’s lots of magic in that.”
Dan Sampson’s work is consistently on display in Colorado Springs. Check out his work at dan-sampson.pixels.com.