DAIN: The Eye of the Artist

No sense is more essential to art than sight, no organ more critical than the eye. The eye of the artist, the eye of the viewer, the eye of the muse, the eye as a critical component of a portrait, or on its own as the subject of a work.

Some 4,000 years ago the Eye of Horus represented well-being, healing, and protection to ancient Egyptians. More recently, there was da Vinci’s brilliant use of sfumato to invest the Mona Lisa’s sly side-eye with its essential mystery. In 1945, Dalí, raised universal questions about self perception by placing a weeping eyeball on an infinity plane in the piece The Eye. There’s the skull lurking in the pupil of M.C. Escher’s Eye, his 1946 mezzotint contemplation of death.

Van Gogh once said “I would sooner paint people’s eyes than cathedrals.” So what to make of an artist who gleefully demands his audience zero in on the eye of his subjects, who unapologetically ditches subtlety with a pink dripping circle of spray paint as if to shout, “Look, look at this eye!”? Welcome to the world of Brooklyn artist DAIN and his complex, noisy and alluring collage creations.

DAIN, whose work was showing through September at Avant Gallery in New York’s Hudson Yards before moving to Avant’s Miami location in October, is a second generation New York street artist whose practice draws largely on a pair of divergent influences: the chaos and grit of 1980s New York City and the lost urbanity of golden age Hollywood. Commercialism, luxury branding, fashion and urban culture are also part of the mix. But it is the brightly colored, dripping painted circles around one eye of his central subjects that make DAIN’s work at once arresting and instantly recognizable.

The chaos and grit of 1980s New York City and the lost urbanity of golden age Hollywood. Commercialism, luxury branding, fashion and urban culture are also part of the mix. But it is the brightly colored, dripping painted circles around one eye of his central subjects that make DAIN’s work at once arresting and instantly recognizable.

“It’s just kinda something I started doing. The original idea was I wanted you to just focus on the women’s eyes. So it wasn’t about a woman’s body, it was always about her face, her eyes. I started with a little drip, then I started doing the circle with the drip and, now, I actually have a trademark and that’s kinda what I’m known for,” DAIN said, speaking in an aggressive, yet accessible, staccato that confirms his roots in New York’s most populous borough.

A lot of his inspiration comes from his upbringing, first in Coney Island then in Canarsie and Flatbush.

“It was kinda like a different world back then. I started with graffiti probably when I was eight, nine years old. I had an older brother so I used to go out with him,” DAIN told UP Magazine. “That’s where my roots were, just doing graffiti as a young kid growing up. It was everywhere, you couldn’t even look out of the subways, the windows were covered. The highways were covered, the streets were covered, the garbage trucks were covered, everything had graffiti on it….I grew up in a really diverse neighborhood in Flatbush and everybody was doing graffiti back then so it was just kind of something you did,” he added.

“It’s just kinda something I started doing. The original idea was I wanted you to just focus on the women’s eyes. So it wasn’t about a woman’s body, it was always about her face, her eyes. I started with a little drip, then I started doing the circle with the drip and, now, I actually have a trademark and that’s kinda what I’m known for,” DAIN said

Add to that nascent artistic mix the influence of his father, who instilled in DAIN a love for vintage Hollywood: “I remember as a kid he used to say you’ve gotta watch this movie “On the Waterfront.” It’s the greatest movie you’ll ever see, with Marlon Brando. I said I’m not gonna watch a movie in black and white, you gotta be kidding me. You ask my wife, that’s pretty much all I watch now is black and white. I love those old films. I love Humphrey Bogart. I love the way the women looked, with their hair and the eyes. There was something left to the imagination; you couldn’t see color so you kinda had to fill in the colors yourself, you know,” he said.

After years of spray painting tags and other work on the streets and highways of Brooklyn (a fear of rats kept him out of the subway, the favored real estate of many early graffiti writers), DAIN discovered silk screening as a medium for making t-shirts. From there, it wasn’t far to the collage and wheat paste that would define his later work.

“When I was kid I used to put graffiti on the streets so I started putting (collage work) on the streets. It was like not everybody walks into a gallery, but everybody walks in the streets of New York, so everybody could see the work. If you’re in Chinatown, uptown, wherever it might be.…From there it just kinda took off where galleries started seeing my stuff on the streets and I’ve been showing in galleries for probably the last 20 years now,” he said.

His inspiration was binary, beauty and grit, and that showed in his work which likewise featured seemingly contradictory components: smiling visages with tear-like drips falling from the eyes, luxury brand logos next to those of household products, unyielding fonts juxtaposed with shredded paper and haphazardly applied paint.

Take the 2023 piece Handle Questo Beauty, which is rendered lovingly on canvas with wheat paste, acrylic, and spray paint like all recent work by DAIN. The focal point of the work is the face of a beautiful young woman in black and white with spray painted red lips and, of course, the dripping pink ring around her right eye. The left side of her head is embellished with spray painted purple, hot pink and orange roses giving it a lovely feminine air, which is promptly undone by a piece of a Black Diamond Motor Oil label to her right.

Questo Beauty seems to be beckoning you forward with her left hand, but look closer and you’ll see that it is a man’s hand, adding mystery and uncertainty to the proceedings. The right hand, also male, is wicked-witch green and appears headed toward a face palm. One of the hands is wearing a watch and there are at least two other partial timepieces in the piece, suggesting impermanence and a fleeting narrative.

At the bottom are the words New York, in a font appropriated from the New York Post’s logo with its shaded, three-dimensional Franklin Gothic font and distinctive slant, giving the piece ballast, authority and strength. The left and right edges descend into chaos with portions of words competing with each other for prominence amid splashes of paint and riven paper. All of the works on show at Avant are similarly complex and exhausting.

The 2019 piece Coca Chanel, for example, harkens to another time, specifically the 1950s. Its principal feature is an image of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, a couple who’s glamor quotient has rarely been eclipsed before or since. They are both smiling, her hand supporting her chin, his hands clasped before them. In the original black and white photograph, the two occupy a curved banquette at a restaurant table with an ashtray and some glasses before them, but all that is lost in DAIN’s vision of the couple.

Joe’s face is mostly left in its original black and white, with slight coloration around his lips and neck, suggesting his conservative demeanor. Marilyn, as in real life, is much more colorful, with her yellow hair, bright red lips and of course a pink circle dripping below her left eye. Their faces are obscured by rough hewn masks: on her the Chanel logo appears, on him it’s a sliver of what could be the Coca-Cola logo. It is a naked and provocative evaluation of celebrity in a thrillingly and unsubtle way. It speaks of the darkness and risk of celebrity that would soon doom the couple.

“There’s a lot going on in his work, it transcends graffiti. The color palette is very, very sophisticated and that alone is just an element of beauty that plays against the messiness. The color palette is always so alluring and different than anything I’d ever seen before. I find it to be a very interesting balance of beauty and chaos,” Sandler said.

Color plays a pivotal role in these works as it does across DAIN’s oeuvre. The hot pink, chartreuse, Caribbean blue, Martian green, pale yellow, flat purple and other colors are made louder by the economical use of black, white and shades of gray. This is another DAIN trademark.

Richard Sandler, the renowned New York City street photographer who shared billing with DAIN at Avant, suggested that DAIN’s work succeeds largely because of its binary nature and unique use of color. While Sandler’s oeuvre exists predominantly in a black and white, he expressed admiration for the color in DAIN’s.

“There’s a lot going on in his work, it transcends graffiti. The color palette is very, very sophisticated and that alone is just an element of beauty that plays against the messiness. The color palette is always so alluring and different than anything I’d ever seen before. I find it to be a very interesting balance of beauty and chaos,” Sandler said.

But for all the cosmopolitan hipness suggested in his work, DAIN is actually a bit of an anachronism. He doesn’t care much for modern movies, television, or the Internet. He spends a lot of his time with his wife and four kids, all under 12. He’s never really studied the work of other artists in any organized way and he’s hard pressed to cite influences from either the world of fine art or street art. When pressed, he mentions the work of artists Sane/Smith, Joz, Easy, Keith Haring and the music of the Beastie Boys, Run DMC, punk rock and ska.

“I wasn’t someone who grew up going to museums and galleries; it just wasn’t something that I knew. I knew the streets as a kid. I had no training; I didn’t really know much about art or artists. There were a few guys I followed, but I wouldn’t call them influences. My work pretty much grew out of my experience,” he said.

“I wasn’t someone who grew up going to museums and galleries; it just wasn’t something that I knew. I knew the streets as a kid. I had no training; I didn’t really know much about art or artists. There were a few guys I followed, but I wouldn’t call them influences. My work pretty much grew out of my experience,” he said.

Today, DAIN’s work is more in demand than ever. This summer he was finishing up walls inside the newest Spin restaurant in Times Square, his fourth for them, before heading to Chicago to do more mural work. These large pieces, some 50-feet across, require his work to scale, and it does. The eye rings, though, have gotten a lot bigger, perhaps four feet in diameter instead of a few inches.

Shakespeare, or was it Da Vinci or Cicero, who said “the eyes are the window to the soul.” Writing in The Bible, Matthew said “the eye is the lamp of the body.” Add to those famous lines this one from DAIN: “The eye is the heart of beauty and sexiness.”

J. Scott Orr is a career writer, editor and a recovering political journalist. His work has appeared nationally in countless newspapers, magazines and websites. He is publisher of the East Village art magazine B Scene Zine.

 Instagram: @bscenezine

Website: bscenezine.com