Today we’d like to introduce you to James (david) Sherrill
James (David), we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
10 years ago I opened a vintage door in downtown Canton called Arrowhead vintage. In my spare time I was taking thrifted landscape paintings and adding little funny characters to them, Sasquatches And gnomes and UFOs. When the pandemic hit I was on immunosuppressants and was not sure how susceptible I would be to the virus so I closed my doors and started selling the vintage stuff online. Things are not going very well and we were very afraid that we were going to lose our business. At night I would put my art on Reddit under the username DaveRuinsArt. The post blew up and was on the front page for a few days And was asked for an interview by the people at Newsweek. Since then I’ve been making art for celebrities and sending paintings All around the world including Italy and Paris. It’s now 5 years later and I’ve been a professional artist this whole time. I have not reopened the vintage store but instead it’s a studio for me to paint and a place for me to box and ship paintings and prints. I do have plans to eventually open the front of the store and sell off the vintage stuff and just make it a storefront that sells my art. I occasionally will have people from Germany or Italy who are touring America and want to come see what I’m doing lol. I would eventually like to have a nice place for them to visit instead of a dirty art studio LOL. I currently have over a quarter of a million followers across all my social media and am restarting my YouTube channel as an educational and entertainment art based channel.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No it’s always been a struggle. There’s been some very good times, but there’s been times where it’s been very, very lean and we were scared that we weren’t going to make it. All online artists have get pestered with scams in con man and I’m sad to admit that I’ve fallen for a couple of them but not for very much money. I’ve had a lot of people waste my time and had to learn the hard way on a lot of situations.
It was also very hard to become a viral sensation for painting when I really didn’t know the foundations. So I’ve been self-educating myself in traditional art skills for the last 5 years and I’m seeing it really pay off and my art is starting to bloom into something a little bit better than it was.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am well known for taking thrifted landscape paintings and adding large monsters to them, but I’ve grown since then and have been copying and studying famous artists like Van Gogh and Picasso and I’m going to start working Salvador Dali and MC Escher soon. I work with traditional art skills, but I also incorporate some really fun, weird things into my art like glow-in-the-dark features or LED lights. I’ll build my art into shadow boxes and stuff. I like for my art to be a little bit psychedelic but sometimes that works better than others. I also make full videos of each of my paintings so when someone buys my painting they can actually watch the process of me creating it and show it to their friends, which I think is a pretty cool thing to see. My friends say that as an artist my uniqueness is in my sense of play. I really like to not take myself seriously and have lots of fun when I’m working.
Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
The most important lesson that I’ve learned as an artist is that traditional art skills are not a set of rules that need to be rebelled against, but a series of observations written down for thousands of years on how to create more beautiful art and traditional art skills should be embraced. And once you know all of the information, it will allow you to create the things in your mind better. Being an online artist, I’ve had some really harsh criticism and I’ve learned to not only take that with a grain of salt, but to embrace it and realize that that criticism is very important because it does show people what you actually if you were does feel about your art.
Pricing:
- Prints are $40
- Painting start at $200
- T-Shirts are around $30
- Stickers can be like $3
- Posters are $60
Contact Info:
- Website: https://DaveRuinsArt.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/daveruinsart?igsh=NGdwd2RxZnZhOGU2
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1Azjzzg19d/
- Twitter: None
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DaveRuinsArt
- Yelp: None
- Other: https://arrowheadcanton.com
