Because of the current state of the world, and maybe because I’m a topical political cartoonist most days of the week, I thought I would take a personal trip back to the process of painting large canvases in oil for my current series of paintings, My work aims to express the raw emotions of war through abstract expressionism and the symbolism of how ordinary things get rendered useless and brought to their bare bones through the destruction of war. War has always been a paintful topic for me: from the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars to the current war in Ukraine. My paintings are metaphorical depictions of those atrocities. I use the car as a symbol to depict war’s savagery. My goal in this series of paintings is to convey the emotional impact of war through line, shape, paint application, color and composition. These are not hopeless paintings though, because as seen with the Ukraine people, they’re tough and through grit and determination are rebuilding what has been destroyed.

Lately I’ve had a regular gig on weekends in the Wenatchee World. In the World, I do local and sometimes Nationally focused political cartoons. Sometimes I do caricatures of local and Nationally known people in those political cartoons. I do some teaching of cartoons and basic drawing and painting here and there around the valley. You can find my gag cartoons in the back of the Comet magazine, most of the time. I’m married with two adult children and two nearly adult grandkids.

You can see my work on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/dan.mcconnell.art – Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/cartoonydan/ – BlueSky – https://bsky.app/profile/cartoonydan.bsky.social –

Website:
https://nationalcartoonists.com/author/dan-mcconnell/?v=f24485ae434a

Contact:
cartoonydan@gmail.com
(509) 630-9092