This week’s installment from News-Press Storyteller Amy Bennett Williams introduces us to the seemingly unlikely Southwest Florida artist James McDonald, whose work toe’s the line between whimsical and haunting.
He's a tattooed Navy vet who grew up running barefoot through Tice, a LaBelle High School grad who knows the best fishing hole in Hendry County, a guy with a scruffy beard whose job is to keep heavy machinery going.
Got the picture yet?
Add this to it: Jason McDonald is a capital "A" artist who squeezes his creativity in around the margins of his already crammed-busy life with astonishing results.
Using marking pens and old plywood, cardboard boxes and glue, he fashions intricate works at once whimsical and haunting: a corrugated, sharp-beaked donkey, a swervy pictographic World War II novel, a sheaf of black-and-white drawings created atop an old metal printing plate.
It's the last series, "Oddy Knocky," that currently occupies most of his art-making time.
Coined by Anthony Burgess in "A Clockwork Orange," the term is slang meaning "alone." McDonald, 43, writes "Oddy Knocky" into many of the pieces, each carefully rendered on slick pieces of a stack of paper McDonald found in the trash.
"I use Sharpies and Krink (ink)," he says. "When I needed shading, I learned to color my fingers and use my fingerprints and smudge it, so if you ever need a positive ID on me, you've got a better record than the FBI would ever have."
He draws them on work breaks. "I live on the go," says the divorced father of three who commutes from Fort Myers to keep the Naples Daily News' presses running. "That's the trick — teach yourself to work quickly because time is so limited you have to pack everything into a small package."
Once they're done, McDonald photographs the pieces then posts them on Instagram. Often, he introduces them with scraps of prose — or is it poetry?
Oddy Knocky sleeps late, wakes early. Under water is as safe as a cemetery. Hungry ghosts.
Oddy Knocky finds the tree, buries the sky behind it. Dreams begin and end like this.
"(Words) are something I've always inserted into what I do," he says. "I'm a very visual thinker and, to me, words are a series of pictures. Like his two-dimensional Holocaust love story, "Packet of Catsup Man," which includes numbered chapters, staring bloodshot eyes, the gates of Auschwitz — even a few giggles.
"I like it when people laugh," McDonald says, "when they spend some time with it and get a little chuckle." He also likes sending his audience into the same trancy state he experiences when creating. "That's when it all comes into focus."
Though he exhibits his work occasionally (he's got a show coming up at the next ArtWalk) and shares a Fort Myers studio next to the Alliance for the Arts, McDonald's nowhere near supporting himself with his art ... yet.
The problem isn't that his work hasn't been well-received. Art critic Tom Hall, who writes for the online "Examiner," says McDonald's art "manifests as a stream of consciousness that is his unique style of fluff and grit... (His) lyrical and fluid style of rendering... stimulates interest on a cerebral level in a whimsical and sometimes heartily silly viewpoint."
But so far, McDonald's biggest supporters have been his high school teacher girlfriend, Lynette Rodriguez, and his studiomates. "And my Mom," McDonald adds. "All of what I put on her fridge." Ideally, collectors' walls will one day replace his mother's refrigerator.
"To be able to do this — to be able to take this out into the world," he says with a sigh. "I would love to just share it and find new ways of amazing myself."