Doof Artist Profile: Jesus Diablo

One of the many leading practitioners of west coast graffiti style in the early 1980's,  Jesus Diablo, (1959-) painted controversial murals in the parking garage for the Whitney biennale. Diablo retreated from the art world for the rest of the twentieth century but remerged in the new millennium when he  became acquainted with Doof imagery and culture through a friend, artist Tim Sharman. Diablo began a  Doof graffiti project in 2004 using a street persona, Mazo and created urban friendly disposable graffiti. Diablo soon retreated from this practice and started to use the Doof in the traditional format of the retablo. His retablos has the Doof as a vision or night visitor that haunts a balding middle aged artist in his pajamas.

Doof Artist Profile: Christian Paul

Christian Paul

Conceptual Doof Photographer

Born 1977, Milwaukee WI

Lives in New York, Chicago, Berlin

Education: MFA Florida State University,

Attended: Stanford, Yale, Brown and the

Berlin Art Academy.

Christian Paul is a photographer who employs modern

image taking technology to capture images of memory.

His visions of antique toy boxes filled with treasures from

so long ago.

The actors in Paul’s dramas are from his late father’s

collection of Doof memoribllia. His father collected all forms

of the Doof. Paul found boxes of the stuff in his father’s

house after his father’s passing and decided to dedicate his artistic career the contents of those boxes.

Quote: “Memory should not be forgotten.”

His direction has changed over his career. He began as an outdoor type. He surfed, backpacked and skate and ski boarded. Artistically, he was into video and was a lead singer for a small time punk band, the Drags.

Like the great photographer, Andres Sorrono, Paul sometimes shoots his subject through liquids, enhancing the mystery of the subject.

Christian was considered at one time to be of interest and was to be invited to be included in some really big group shows, but it never materialized.

His mother and father were both in the food industries. They also were “Dead Heads”.

Paul sees the Doof as a lost American icon. A slowing fading memory in the nation’s mind.

Paul was a wrestler in high school and college. He got his masters in art while on scholarship to Florida State University.

Paul was for a short period, an underwear model.

His father told him to take up photography, for he felt his son did not possess the drafting skills needed to become a fine artist.

Doof Artist Profile: Timmy Lee

Timmy Lee was one of 12 children born to Brutus and Sarah Lee on October 17, 1925. The Family lived in the Central Valley of California. Brutus was the owner of an orchard started by his great grand father. But Brutus was never meant to cultivate the land and so took a job as a deputy sheriff for Toulume county and the family settled into the little foothill town of Sonora.

Lee grew up restless and when he finished high school, he immediately joined the Navy. When he was discharged he came back to California and landed in the lumber industry of Northern

California. Because of his training of painting the sides of the Navy ships while at sea, Lee was very agile and could climb a tree fast and surely, and the need for climbers were always a priority. After a few falls, he made his way to jobs in the local lumbermills and worked the saws until a freak runaway man-size saw blade accident left him an arm and two toes short.

After the accident, Lee discovered religion and became a member of the flock of the Church of the Reasonable Christ. Filled with the holy spirit, Lee soon opened, Carving for Christ, a wood carving studio deep in California’s northwest. It was a mixture of the losing of limbs and gaining of spirituality that gave Lee a new fervor in which to make things of art and he worked with a passion.

In time, Lee was introduced to the Doof Wood Collective who had a chapter near Lee’s home and longed admired how Lee did all his carving with just a handsaw. They invited him to join in their wood carving get-togethers and Lee accepted. Lee became exposed to the image of the Doof and had his second religious experience. He became obsessed with the image and is still carving Doofs at the ripe old age of 87.

Timmy Lee's Photo Gallery

In the late 1980’s created a series of work that closely resembled the sculptural work of H. C. Westerman. The pieces were carved from redwood posts that were the cast offs that Lee would collect in his old pick-up truck from construction sites in the area.