The Art of Dave Van Patten

Mark after mark, color after color, a young Dave Van Patten continues to draw his small magazine for his sixth-grade class.

This magazine was going to be marketed to other classes, but the pages full of gross, gory monsters inspired by Alien and the Predator movies disgusted his teacher and didn’t make it to students' eyes.

While some may consider that disheartening, the young boy just wanted to keep drawing.

“So I kind of say, I had a banned book at a young age,” Van Patten chuckled. 

Since 2009, Van Patten has painted and drawn professionally for companies, music artists, and for the City of Long Beach. 

LBC Treehouse mural, courtesy of Dave Van Patten.

He would even receive one of the highest recognitions of his career, a Grammy for his Grateful Dead album cover.

“Pretty much every single business in the world needs art like they need some sort of logo or they need something, some sort of design,” Van Patten said. 

Art has been natural to Van Patten, creating comics during his childhood inspired by works such as Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side and then turning his focus to photo-realism into his early adulthood.

Although he had that drive for creation, he didn’t automatically go into professional artwork.

Having moved to Long Beach in 2000 to attend Long Beach State, it was during his general education classes that he started becoming more interested in creative writing and began to play in a band, taking a step back from drawing. 

“It just seemed like it was either going to have to be like a gallery artist or get a job as an animator where I just did like hundreds of sequence sketches and it just, to me, just seemed kind of boring,” Van Patten said. “I didn't really, at that point, know the tools as far as how to make it professionally as an artist.”

During this music arc, Van Patten would switch around different music genres, such as punk rock and freak folk, and would tour the country with his band. 

It wasn’t until his band dissolved that he began looking into how he wanted to tell his stories. Rather than go back to just creative writing, he believed that drawing would be able to represent what his ideas are.

“I kind of just was like, ‘oh, yeah, there's this part of me that it's just been dormant for a while and actually may be really useful for the sake of telling narratives,” Van Patten said. “It really was like being reunited with a best friend.”

Alex's Bar mural, photo by Nicholas Broadhead.

Once reunited in 2009, Van Patten focused on developing his style and what he wanted to accomplish with it. Inspired by the art of Edward Gorey and R. Crumb, he would combine that inspiration with his interests in dark humor and surrealistic art.

As time would move on, he would continue adding different elements into his artwork, such as vibrant colors and a punk focus, as his musical interests began to form into his work. 

“Since I'm colorblind, I've always had trouble with that. But luckily, my partner is just kind of a genius with colors,” Van Patten said. 

His drawing process also involves more rough sketching with pencils, rather than going straight to ink on paper like some of his artist friends do. 

“When you're sketching on paper and pencil, you can just kind of make as many mistakes as you need and you're not worried about getting the image perfect,” Van Patten said. “You're an architect kind of just building the shape and that's when all the ideas come.”

Van Patten would start his professional career making artwork for local bands and logos for companies. But as he spent more time in Long Beach, he began finding opportunities to share his art with the city.

Because street art and murals are ingrained in Long Beach’s culture, companies such as World Wide Walls allow artists to paint murals and other artworks for the city. Van Patten would be given the opportunity to paint murals with the company.

“If you get known in the art scene here, it's just a lot easier to get work and it's more intimate as far as kind of knowing the different local businesses and stuff like that,” Van Patten said.

Hotel Royal mural, photo by Nicholas Broadhead.

These murals got Van Patten to continue getting offers to work throughout the city. He would eventually branch out to not only nearby cities, but also with large companies such as Starbucks on Long Beach Boulevard and Willow.

“I believe the Arts Council of Long Beach referenced my art to Starbucks and that's how I got that gig,” Van Patten said.

Long Beach continued to help him with his career and connections, but he would also start to do album art for different record labels and companies. This work would culminate into being offered to do art for bands such as The Grateful Dead.

Illustration by Dave Van Patten.

One of the albums that would forever change his career would be the 2022 Grateful Dead album “In and Out of the Garden: Madison Square Garden 81’, 82’, 83’.”

This job would be different in terms of what Van Patten needed to create, as he was told to make completely new characters. He would also try not to use tricks he would use during his art process and work above and beyond the kind of process he typically does when creating his pieces.

“I went super method. I just did nothing but listen to Grateful Dead for months and just got super stoned all the time,” Van Patten said. “I feel like I almost received the messages through the music while I was working on the art.”

The push that Van Patten and his team went through was enough to win themselves a Grammy for ”Best Box Set or Special Limited Edition Package” at the 2023 Grammy Awards. 

In and Out of the Garden: Madison Square Garden ’81, ’82, ’83 album packaging, courtesy of jambands.com.

Even with this win under his belt, Van Patten sees the nomination as more valuable than the win, as that focus on trying to win is detrimental to the mind. 

“As far as being chosen for the nomination, that's something that, it's a very elite [thing], like all the best people or the smartest people in the art field are making that vote for you to be a nomination,” Van Patten said. “Just winning the Grammy was just kind of the icing on the cake.”

While Van Patten says this could be the highlight of his career, it hasn’t slowed down his progress creating ideas. One he hopes to create is a graphic novel focusing on a narratively driven story of his own original characters.

“I have a lot of, kind of one page comics or five page comics, but the goal is to do a full length graphic novel,” Van Patten said. “It's just really tough. I mean, I have a lot of respect for people that are able to illustrate 200 or 300 pages and have it all be, for the most part, the same style.”

Mural on 2nd and PCH shopping center, photo by Nicholas Broadhead.

With ideas in his mind and passion in his heart, Van Patten is thankful that he continues to do what he loves for a living. 

Although it can be really stressful at times with certain assignments, what gets him through those times is the old saying, “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

“I feel almost more of a moral obligation to create art that's interesting,” Van Patten said. “In a sense, we're all kind of living day to day in our personal rat race and just kind of [give] the push to wake up and look at the world, look at ourselves and try to be better and try to be more interesting.”