DENNIS – As a touring, Grammy-nominated musician, Garrett Dutton of Orleans has taken to stages big and small all over the world in a career spanning three decades. But the musician widely known as G. Love first found his creative spark through street art, namely graffiti writing.
In a video produced by Lower Cape TV that was shown at the Cape Cod Museum of Art on Jan. 2, Dutton said graffiti writing was part of life growing up in Philadelphia.
“I never really had any kind of intentions to be an artist. It was just something that we were doing,” he said. “It was part of the hip hop culture, which was also part of my music. But it was kind of an inner city thing. All the kids were skateboarding, playing basketball and writing graffiti. And then later we got into music.”
The museum is hosting “It’s All Love,” an exhibit of Dutton’s paintings and graffiti art, through Feb. 16. The lobby of the museum is decked out with paintings, chairs and other pieces Dutton has produced over the years from a barn in his home in Orleans.
Dutton’s earliest forays into graffitiing were done not with paint but with crabapples, he said, recalling how juice from the apples would stain the walls of buildings. He spent countless hours working on his “tag,” which at the time was “Look.” His work started catching people’s attention around the city, not all of it wanted, he said.
“My father was walking home from work and he saw my tag all over this building, this apartment building called the Towers,” he said in the video. “He was really pissed.”
When he moved to Boston to pursue music in 1992, he met up with upright bassist Jim Prescott and drummer Jeffrey Clemens, with whom he formed G. Love and Special Sauce. The trio’s deft mashup of delta blues and hip hop quickly found a home at Epic Records, to which the group signed in 1993.
But as Dutton’s music career took off, his art came along for the ride. His graffiti art populated show fliers, setlists, merchandise and album art. Eventually, he started incorporating his art pieces on stage. It started with the stools and chairs the singer performs on onstage, a tribute to one of his biggest musical inspirations, the bluesman John Hammond.
“So then one day, I don’t know, someone said ‘Hey, can I buy that chair off the stage?’ I said ‘OK, sure.’ So then I went to a thrift store, got another chair and painted it. And it kind of became a thing. I started calling them blues chairs.”
From there, Dutton started incorporating paintings and other art pieces into his musical performances, which similarly solicited the interest of fans. Most recently, he’s started to design specialized trucker hats that he sells at his shows. During a winter tour last year, he sold about 500, he said.
“I’ve done thousands of pieces of artwork,” he said. “I would say specifically with the paintings, I’m sure that I’m in the hundreds.”
Despite all this, Dutton said he still has trouble calling himself an “artist.” But Benton Jones, director of art for the Cape Cod Museum of Art, felt otherwise.
“I kicked a whole spiel to Benton about letting me curate a show, and he said ‘Well, what we’d like to do is for you to do a show.’”
Following the video, which was shown as part of the exhibit’s opening reception on Jan. 2, Dutton took time to answer questions from members of the audience. He talked about the art that has inspired him, and where his art and music intersect.
“It’s been a wonderful creative outlet outside of my music,” he said of his graffiti work. “I find that they compliment each other in the sense that they’re both part of my performance onstage, and they both kind of fulfill a different kind of creative flow. One helps the other, so there’s a really nice relationship that keeps your creative juices flowing.”
The majority of Dutton’s art boasts the tag “Love,” which he modified from “Look” as his music career took off in the 1990s. On the theme of his show, he said love is “the mission” of his music.
“Writing ‘love’ over and over and over again, it’s almost like a mantra,” he said. “So that’s what I’m putting forward.”
The exhibit opening was followed Saturday by a special musical performance, with all proceeds going to benefit the museum.
Email Ryan Bray at ryan@capecodchronicle.com
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
