During the pandemic, artist Daniel McCoy was the driver for his family as he helped them isolate in their homes. “I was driving all over. They were locked in. I was under the impression that it was the end of the world,” he says of that time in 2020 and 2021. “I was sharing a studio with Mateo Romero at the time and he was influencing me to do landscapes, and then all my driving around looking at the land and sunsets, that pushed me in that direction, too. I was also trying to isolate myself, so I would go hiking where there were no people. I really started seeing the landscape.”
McCoy, a prominent graphic artist, illustrator and designer, had never done landscapes before, so they were new to his studio. He was mostly doing surreal and almost psychedelic comic-style art.
It was work influenced greatly by artists he loved such as R. Crumb, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin and others. Their imagery was filtered through the work of Native American artists like Acee Blue Eagle, Joan Hill, and Jerome and Johnny Tiger. These artists influenced his work, but landscapes were still foreign to him, until he started making them himself.
“[Landscapes] were helping me just let go as an artist,” he says. “They were almost meditational. I would stop at the top left and just keep working until I was in the bottom right. They were painting themselves.”
McCoy’s newest paintings, both comic-style Pop Art pieces and landscapes, will be in the solo show As the Days Grow Shorter, opening October 4 at Hecho a Mano in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Many of the landscape works will show off the land around Santa Fe, where he lives now. Other works are more abstract, with blocks of color or a patchwork of texture overlayed on top of the image. Some of the work will show his sense of humor, including Santa Fe Fun at Sundown, which has recurring characters that are a burrito and a hot sauce packet.
Published in Native American Art, October 2024