TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK: I grew up in a very religious family.
There were several ministers in my family.
You know, it was a sense of community.
It was um filled with beautiful
stories and great music.
And those stories are things
that you can just kind of
take along in your pocket and
take out whenever you need them.
I thought I wanted to be a comic book artist,
but over time I became interested
in different kinds of art.
But I never lost that love for that
kind of storytelling, you know,
this idea of superheroes and
this panel by panel narrative.
I like to pick language that
has a certain kind of a cadence
and I like to pick words
that have double meanings.
Or, if you take a letter away it’ll
be maybe even an opposite word.
Sometimes words explode and its
just about each individual letter.
TDH: Mounds are these half
human, half plant mutants
that came to life about 50,000 years ago
when an ape man masturbated in a field of flowers.
His human parts are co-mingling
with the plant parts and, like,
it’s starting to bubble and boil and
something’s about to sprout out of this mess,
and that’s the Mound.
The story comes to me as visions.
After I realized what Mounds were,
I had a lot of questions for myself.
So, where do they come from?
How tall are they?
Do they eat?
Like, just all of these types of things.
And in asking the question, you can
then almost have like an epiphany
and from there you just keep
going and it actually snowballs.
And to me, that’s what the vision is all about.
This painting here is called “By and By”
and this is the last in a series of paintings
that are about the life and
death of Mound number one
and his name is The Legend.
And the skeleton of Mound Number
One has been left in the forest,
and all of the forest animals and even
some animals that are not from the forest
have come to grieve and to pay their respects.
I’ve always like the story of Noah’s Ark
and the idea of all of these animals that
put their differences aside
to coexist in this one space.
And that’s kind of what’s happening here.
All the animals from around the
world have gathered together
to pay homage to this great creature.
When you see black and white or
words within paintings, it’s Loid.
And Loid is kind of a father type of an energy.
And he’s also all about kind of black and white.
There’s no in between.
Painter is a spirit energy who is
kind of a mothering type of an energy.
Anytime you see colors within the paintings,
that’s as a result of Painter’s presence.
A lot of it comes back to my mother.
She is Painter and she is
Loid wrapped up into one.
You know, she is the smiling face of Painter,
she is the color that you get from Painter.
But at the same time she was
stern when she spoke her word
you had to listen, so she was also Loid.
Mom: A lot of his art, I think, is
what he has seen over the years,
over his childhood --
some of the hurtful things, I think.
And then he wanted to get in
there and do something about it.
And I think he has created someone to do that,
and that has become his Torpedo person.
Torpedo Boy is kind of my alter ego.
And I created him when I was, I
would say, in the fourth grade.
He can fly, he can lift things.
He’s a super hero.
And he’s super strong, except
he has an inflated ego.
Mom: I think eventually he will really find out
who can actually solve it all
and that goes right back
to his roots and the Bible.
TDH: Painter and Loid, you know,
with their son Torpedo Boy,
is a lot like the Holy Trinity.
God sent his son down to save the Earth.
Torpedo Boy is sent to like
protect these Mound creatures
and to do good things. But
Torpedo Boy is terribly flawed.
And his pride and all of his other human emotions
get in the way of him performing his duties.
He looks like me.
He is me.
I even have a Torpedo Boy outfit
that I wear while I’m painting.
In the show ‘It Came from the Studio Floor,’
Torpedo Boy is the protagonist.
And we are taken step by step through where he was
when Mound Number One was attacked and killed.
So, we get to see what, you know,
what was the hold up,
why didn’t he make it in time
to save Mound Number One?
In a way the scale of the show is kind of heroic.
Like, there’s a giant Torpedo
Boy “T” painted on the wall.
But, he arose and fell all in the same show.
(laughs) It’s pretty pathetic.
I tend to have an entourage
with me wherever I go –
not necessarily people, but objects.
I have a collection of grocery lists,
plastic tops, amateur paintings,
photos I find on the ground.
Balloons – you can never have too many balloons.
This belonged to my
grandfather, who was a butcher,
and I guess he used this to
shield himself from offal
and various meat juices.
I don’t know, I just like to
have echoes of my family around
and then they echo into the work.
Even here at home, I like to
have things out all the time.
I’m a big toy collector and
I’ve been actively trying to
piece together my childhood
by finding all of those toys.
It’s just an effort to reconnect with a time
when I was just a little more
open and receptive to things.
And its just great to have these
things around me as a reminder.
It’s almost a dangerous obsession,
like I have to get all of the toys
since some of my toys were taken away,
I have to now get all of them back.
I had one when I was a kid,
but it got thrown away.
Monica: Some people put things
in files or folders or stacks,
but he doesn’t stack, he piles.
TDH: I’m getting better about
filing things because of her,
because she’s organized, she can do that.
It’s hard.
Anywhere I move, these
mounds seem to move with me.
It's like, in my car there’s a
pile of things that’s a mound.
In my studio, there’s piles
of things all over the place
and that’s how I pick from these piles.
What’s happening with the
pieces that are in the studio,
I see those as colorful blasts of
energy or communication from Mounds,
these visions of hope.
So in a way it’s like God’s promise
with the rainbow after the flood.
In my work, I feel I’m finally
being able to bring together
the worlds of comic book narratives
and the history of abstraction.