Dan Mitchell On The Business Of Making Paradise
Words by Ernie van Amstel. Disclaimer: none of the people involved in this piece have ever been to the state of Florida.
In certain latitudes, there comes a span of time in the lead-up to and following the summer solstice when the cicadas start clicking very loudly, and the nights turn humid and green.
Anywhere near the equator experiences this phenomenon. When this happens, you can witness all kinds of tropical changes in behaviour and environment. Plants get large and sweaty, the quality of light becomes emulsified, people get drunk quicker and wear more and more abbreviated clothing.
During such nights my mind turns increasingly to nature and its fantasies. From what I can understand, this is a global experience. Anyone who lives in the green bracelet of tropics that circumnavigates the earth’s equator knows what I’m talking about. Some have even put a name to this phenomenon, one such example is the term ‘Mango Fever’, coined by the Queenslanders - a demographic that can safely be considered a voice of authority on heat and depravity.
When I think of paradise, I think of a warm garden. A warm garden called Florida. Upon talking with artist and landscaper Dan Mitchell, I discovered that he also harbours kindred feelings for The Sunshine State, the land of sinkholes and silicone implants. What forms the uniting interest in Dan’s work is a variance of this Floridian disposition, something like Mango Fever. A sense of wonder and magic combined with something feral. Crocodiles and sunsets. The natural sublime. His work is tender and unpredictable and also deeply threatening to the nervous system. Looking at his work incites something within you that is hard to put to rest.
Dan pulled out some large pieces of paper and tiled them into a grid of four on his studio floor, the combined area was so large I had to stand on a stool to get a vantage point on the scene. A man on a quad bike hoons down the face of a synthetic wave as stars rip across the sky. I am absorbed by a punch-drunk feeling of excitement in my stomach like I’m coming up, accompanied by the throb of that THX theatre effect. Dan’s paintings are retinal fireworks. Loaded inside, encrusted in oil and chalk, and releasing energy in bursts of neon. The work is subsidised by joy, even when it is not obviously joyous, even when it is a dark swamp, slick with grime. It is uninhibited and played well.
Dan didn’t make any art for a whole decade. He didn’t even try to. He felt like perhaps he didn’t have enough life experience at the time to make the good stuff - the good stuff I was gawking at in his colourful studio. These indulgent, sulphuric scapes. That’s another thing - Dan is gifted with an intuition for space. He manipulates matter and area in his occupation as a landscaper, and his work is implicated with a very freeing spatial understanding. He paints psychic valleys, oceans and grottos. In this way, Dan is playing sandbox with the world. He is in the business of making paradise, which is apt because the word itself means ‘garden’ in Persian. At the end of my visit, he offered to show me a technique he has been implementing recently. He pulled out a Milwaukee circular sander and started eroding the canvas. The paint and linen appeared scraped and worn after a few very excruciating seconds.
Like Dan himself, his art is untethered by the cult of productivity, politics or classical schools of thought. His garden is uncontained. It affects you. I left his studio with a clear head and an attitude. Sometimes you have got to get low to get high. Sometimes you have got to stop making things in order to make things. Sometimes you’ve gotta take a grinder to your work to make it better. It might take going to Florida to find paradise. I might make myself a warm garden. I might rather shoot the lock off than use the key.
