My good friend Dan Fenellon, known to many in the digital design world as “Wavedog” (http://www.wavedog.com), needed to build a wheelchair ramp at his home for his son, Brooks.  Brooks has a disability that required him to be in a wheelchair for some time; however, due to his own efforts and the help of a new doctor, he is walking again.  Because of this wonderful turn of events, Dan was able to put the ramp away.  He dismantled it and stored it in his garage as a discard.  For a few months he forgot about it.

One day, out in the garage, he saw the ramp and thought about re-use.  Being the bricoleur that he is, he used this discarded object to try something new.  “Usually,” said Dan, “I just would have walked past it.  But I have a friend who uses found objects in his work and it gave me inspiration to try something new.”  The result is called Transformation (mixed media, 65″ X 56″, 2010).

Trained at the Arts Student League in New York and at the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston, “Wavedog” has been described in Playtimes as “equipped with a unique painting style that infuses cartooning, street modernism, and traditional motifs.” He paints his famous tribal patterns on hot and trendy urban vinyl dolls which he then embellishes with ornamentation in the form of wood sculpted headpieces, metal spikes and additional objects that provide each figure with a distinctive personality. Dan has created a universe of unique sculptural creatures sold at Galleries in New York, LA, and France. In 2009, he was commissioned by the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey to paint a 32 foot mural that hangs 30 feet high in a glass atrium.  And in 2010, he took to the streets of Jersey City to decorate an object usually ignored and passed over — a utility box on the campus of Hudson County Community College.

Transforming ordinary objects

Transformation