Dustin Myers is Perfectly Normal
In Perfectly Normal—the exhibition from Dustin Myers that ran at Los Angeles gallery Thinkspace Projects in November 2023—the Southern California artist presented a collection of young characters painted in oils. Posed in the awkward-yet-endearing postures associated with school photographs, the characters’ exaggerated facial features reveal a bevy of emotions. Some are ready for their close-up. A few clearly don’t want to be in front of a camera. Others appear shy, averting their gaze or forcing smiles. Meanwhile, the titles of the paintings—“Melancholy Paulie,” “Stinkpot Susie,” “Vindictive Valeria” and others—bring to mind the beloved trading card series Garbage Pail Kids.
“I love Garbage Pail Kids,” says Myers, who is based in Santa Ana. “That’s a huge inspiration of mine. That would be a dream, not to follow in those footsteps, but to have my own version of that, just to make up stupid-ass names for people that resemble how they act or behave or how they look or whatever.”
There’s another possible layer to that reference. Where Garbage Pail Kids emerged as a parody of the 1980s Cabbage Patch Kid phenomenon, lampooning commercialism and cuteness in the process, Myers’ paintings take aim at beauty ideals and perfectionism in our increasingly filtered world. He paints faces with creased foreheads, furrowed brows and frown lines. They are faces that appear more real than the digitally enhanced photos of actual human beings that turn up regularly on our timelines. It’s not so much satire as it is a statement that you’re “perfectly normal” the way you are.
“I love weird looking people. I’m a weird looking person myself,” says Myers. “I love to relate with that, and that’s something that comes out of me naturally, so why not shine a light on something that doesn’t normally have a light shown on them?”
I LOVE WEIRD LOOKING PEOPLE. I’M A WEIRD LOOKING PERSON MYSELF.”
By day, Myers teaches art at a continuation high school. “When you’re fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, you kind of have an idea of what you’re doing, but you’re still very influenced. That’s why I love teaching that age,” he says. “Somebody can very easily be pushed in one way or the other, depending on who is doing the pushing, and I try to push in a positive way.”
Similarly, working with young people has impacted the themes that Myers addresses in his own work.
“I am surrounded by teenagers on the daily,” says Myers. “It’s really interesting being a grown man kind of hanging out with kids—a lot of the times more than adults. I don’t have kids myself, but I would assume that’s what it’s like to be a parent, where you’re looking at the world through their eyes. There’s part of me that’s envious, they’re young and they have whole world in front of them—stupid, obvious stuff like that—but then there’s a part of you that’s like, ‘I would hate being a teenager right now because of all of these expectations that are put on you in a sort of world that’s always connected.’”
Even for an adult, the constant stream of images emphasizing perfection can be a little much. “I try to go to the gym a fair amount and I hate looking up gym videos online because I see all these guys with perfect physiques and it’s like, ‘What the hell, my body doesn’t look like that.’ Obviously, I’m old enough to know that shit doesn’t matter,” says Myers.
Yet, it’s perfection that sells. “A lot of people who are naive aren’t going to critically think about the motives behind what these people are doing, but it’s going to for sure affect a lot of their psyches in a negative way,” he says of the images that overload social media. “That’s a huge influence and a big reason why I wanted to do what I did.”
Myers contemplates the impact of digital life from the perspective of an adult who is also online. “I know that I’ll find myself sometimes doomscrolling on my phone at night and I start to be aware of what I’m doing. I usually catch myself and I’m like, what the hell am I watching?” he says. “Then I start to realize that I’m doing exactly what these kids are doing, but these kids are doing it a whole hell of a lot more than me.”
He adds, “I start to realize, if I were to be doing this when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, how is that going to affect the way that I actually feel about who I am?”
Raised in Riverside, California, Myers’ first art sales were to his dad. He has “vivid” memories of spending weekend mornings in the office of his father’s auto body shop, drawing cartoons and copying comic strips for quarters. “I don’t remember if my dad gave it to me or if I finagled it from my dad,” he recalls of the exchange. Much later, when he was studying art at California State University Fullerton, Myers gravitated to oil paints. “I always had this feeling that the things that I wanted to make were things that would have made my fourteen-year-old self happy,” says Myers. “What would he have wanted to bring into this world?”
Myers notes that there’s a push-and-pull between the concept-driven work that was emphasized in art school and making art simply because he wants it to exist. Ultimately, the idea needs to intrigue him enough to take the time to make it because, he says, “that’s going to be my life for the next fifty hours.”
Using the Old Masters’ Technique, Myers paints portraits of fictional folks that highlight quirky facial features, draw from archetypal personalities and often reference late-twentieth-century fashion. In The Misfit Menagerie, his 2022 show at Thinkspace, Myers’ paintings included characters with feathered bangs, large-frame glasses and black lipstick, all posed with animals in their high school yearbook-style portraits.
“I love the idea of nostalgia, which is the shared cultural memories that we all have,” says Myers, who was born in 1984 and describes himself as a “quintessential ‘90s kid.”
I WOULD HATE BEING A TEENAGER RIGHT NOW BECAUSE OF ALL OF THESE EXPECTATIONS THAT ARE PUT ON YOU IN A SORT OF WORLD THAT’S ALWAYS CONNECTED.”
“It’s not that I want my paintings to be one hundred percent about nostalgia,” he adds, “but that is a huge part of who I am, so it’s nice to have that as a layer of interest or a layer of engagement that draws some people in.”
As for his most recent body of work, Myers began work on Perfectly Normal about a year before it opened. “It wasn’t a year of full-time work. It was a year of working on it almost every day, maybe a couple hours here, a couple hours there. I started about a year ago,” he explains. “I set my sights on saying, ‘Hey, I have exactly one year to complete this. How can I get this done? What can I get done in a month? Then trying to imagine how much I could get done within twelve of those months.”
Myers begins with an underpainting and then layers transparent colors on top of that. “The cool thing with that is that it allows me to work on many paintings at once,” he says. “I think that, overall, I was working on six or seven paintings at once. So, as one paint layer was drying on one, it allowed me the opportunity to paint on the next one.”
I TRY TO TREAT IT LIKE IT IS SOMEWHAT LIKE A PHOTO SHOOT, BUT IT’S LIKE A PHOTO SHOOT OF SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T EXIST.”
Both caricature and photography play roles in Myers’ paintings as well. “I love the art of caricature, where you’re trying to highlight somebody’s features that make them unique,” he says. “A lot of those times, those are usually considered ugly. It’s fun to mess around with
the idea of what that is, but also to be able to represent it in a way that isn’t really poking fun at it.”
That’s where balance comes into play. “I really love the idea of balance. In everything that I do, I try to approach it in a balanced way,” says Myers. “This might be grotesque, but how can I feature it in a beautiful way so that it still stays in the center, so that it doesn’t go off kilter. I think that’s a very helpful way of approaching it. So I love the idea of caricature, but I wouldn’t want it to be a caricature for the sake of being a caricature. That’s just a part of the formula.”
Photography is essential when Myers builds his references. “I use a multitude of different references when it comes to drawings. Found photos online. I’ll take my own photos,” he says. “I do collages of everything, digitally, on Photoshop to make sure that everything makes total sense lighting-wise and form-wise and everything. I try to treat it like it is somewhat like a photo shoot, but it’s like a photo shoot of something that doesn’t exist.
One of his first pieces for the series was “Melancholy Paulie,” a portrait of a teenager with a wavy blonde bob with Dutch Boy bangs holding a small dog with very similar hair. “That was extremely intentional,” says Myers of the resemblance between the teen and his pet. “Originally, when I started working on the show, I was thinking that it would be fun to have a majority of them be portraits with animals where the hair resembles each other. Where there’s basically some relationship between the two. I didn’t go down that path fully, but I’m probably going to explore that more in the next show that’s coming up.”
Another standout from the series is “Stinkpot Susie,” a dark-haired girl dressed in ‘90s indie rock fashion who scowls as she holds a pot with a corpse flower and several other pungent plants. “I like the idea that somebody doesn’t know that they’re stinky plants, that it goes over their head and it just looks like regular plants,” says Myers, “but if they know what stinky plants are, it’s something that could connect with them.”
At the time of this interview, Myers was already starting work on his 2024 solo show. “What I’m trying to do right now is trying to be extremely critical of what worked and what didn’t work on the group of paintings that I did for Perfectly Normal,” he says.
With Perfectly Normal, Myers had custom frames made for the works. In his forthcoming show, he plans to make paintings to fit the frames that he is in the process of acquiring. “I’m going to different flea markets every weekend and I’m trying to pick up old frames. Going to different thrift shops,” he says. “Trying to find cool frames on eBay and try to create the pieces based off interesting frames. I think that would have a more natural element when it comes to approaching how big something should be.”
With both a full-time job and his art to manage, Myers maintains a pretty tight schedule.
“I have a love/hate relationship with being busy,” says Myers. He often starts the day with a trip to the gym. “If I’m going to be isolated and painting and in my head a lot, I have to balance that with being extroverted and going to the gym and focus on my mental health and physical well-being,” he says. “That helps so much with being able to paint for hours on end.”
Since Myers teaches art and often has small classes, he can sometimes get in some work on his iPad as the students make their own art. “It’s nice to have that synergy with them,” he says. After school, he allocates time for painting. “Usually, I get home from work around four-ish,” he says. “The goal is to paint for at least three or four hours a night and then I’ll get dinner and go to bed and then I wake up and do it again on the weekdays.”
Even though he tries to keep his weekends open, there’s still a lot on his plate. “Socially speaking, trying to paint and having a full-time job is extremely difficult,” he adds, “but I’m very thankful for the small group of friends that I do have that are very creative and support me and know that I’ll be gone for a little bit because I’m doing my things.”*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose 69, which is available in print here.
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