Trenton Doyle Hancock’s Epic Saga of the Mounds | Art21

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.