The Mythic Worlds of Dan Henderson
Drawing with One Eye Open
Where are you from? What is your background?
I’m originally from Atlanta. I received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Atlanta College of Art and a Master of Fine Arts from Georgia State University. I was a design and art history professor for many years, including a stint in the U.K. at The American College in London.
What inspired you to become an artist?
I’ve been drawing from the get-go, which is ironic since I was born with a congenital eye condition (strabismus or “crossed eyes”). That condition causes the brain to choose one eye to be dominant. I had several childhood surgeries that failed to correct the problem. It rendered me essentially monocular, with zero depth perception. I’ve often wondered if that had anything to do with my ability to draw. I always wanted to somehow draw professionally, but an opportunity presented itself and I ended up in a teaching career. Happily, my drawing activity had high relevance in the classroom.
You have a unique style. Why did you start doing pinup drawings?
My “style” just seems to be my innate visual language. English is my primary verbal language and whatever-the-hell these drawings represent, my visual language. It flows when I draw.
What performer or artist/writer inspires you the most?
As for inspirations, they are diverse. Even though I have an extensive education in art history, the most profound inspirations came from things like early Mad magazine and monster movies. Whatever you see at an early age sticks, regardless of further education. Artists like Wallace Wood and Jack Davis had a big impact. Frazetta’s work for Creepy magazine was fantastic. The cover art Kelly Freas did for Mad in the late ’50s was profound. Interestingly, I never tried to copy the style of the artists who inspired me. Instead, I tried to find the core of the energy they evoked in their work. I tried to tap into what was under the surface. Attempting to find exactly what excited me about their work made me explore and discover my own path. Luckily, I had an older brother who used to bring home those magazines when I was too young to buy them myself. He was also an avid reader and kept me loaded up with classic science fiction novels from a very early age. I’ve also been greatly influenced by cinema. There are many directors I could name, but Alfred Hitchcock is near the top of my list. He embodied the entire history of film, all the way back to the silent movie days. His formative experience with silent film made him rely on the purely visual, and that emphasis can be seen in all of his subsequent work. I guess I would have to add Stanley Kubrick to the list, for similar reasons. Most of the present-day directors I enjoy seem to have been influenced by those two.
What other areas of art are you involved in?
Another creative outlet for me is film. I minored in photography in college and did many experiments with video. I’ve been doing short films for a number of years. These are mostly for my own amusement and sharing with friends. When I’m not drawing, I’m working with Final Cut Pro.
Do you think your environment, where you live, has an effect on the type of art you create?
I don’t think my physical environment has had a particular impact on my work. The only time I felt impacted in that way was when I was living in England. There’s so much history there, and I did some work that drew upon that experience.
What long-term goals do you have?
My only long-term goal is to keep drawing. I spent many years drawing with graphite, colored pencil, pastel, and charcoal. My graduate work consisted of large-format paintings. A couple of years ago I bought a digital tablet. I took to it right away. I can work faster and chew through ideas at an accelerated rate. My approach is the same, just more efficient time-wise. That is an improvement, having once spent a solid year on a colored pencil drawing (!).
What do you think popular culture will be like in ten years?
It’s hard to predict pop culture trends. They tend to be somewhat cyclic. There was a time when rock & roll reinvented itself every ten years. We seem to be overdue for that, or maybe those days are gone. I can only imagine that artificial intelligence will have a huge impact. How we react to that change will form popular culture.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve been asked to do in your profession?
The strangest thing? Hmmm. I’ve done lots of freelance stuff. For a while I was doing patent drafting. These were very precise ink drawings of various inventions and machine parts. Ink is not my favorite medium; I remember holding my breath as I drew precise ink lines. You couldn’t make mistakes. It had to be perfect. One invention involved a video game console. Actually, it was for an arcade game. The proposed game had a Van de Graaff generator built in. That’s one of those gizmos that makes your hair stand up (if you have longish hair). The gimmick was that when achieving a certain score, the juice would kick in and your hair would go wild. A Polaroid-type camera was situated in front of the player, and you would get a photo of your wild hair event. I had to depict this event with linear ink work. The funny thing was: the other patent artists who worked for the law firm were really good at things like machine parts, but they freaked when it came to drawing people. I always found drawing cartoons to be pretty natural, so for me that was the easy part. I got a bonus for drawing “the easy part”!
What projects are you working on now?
Currently I have 5 or 6 drawings underway. I try to always have several ideas brewing. My last published piece was in a book called Imaginary Universes (Citadelles & Mazenod, 2023). It’s a history of literary science fiction with an image for each story covered. They used one of my drawings to illustrate The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. It’s a big, beautiful book, but it’s all in French, and as I said earlier, English is my language so I just look at the pictures. LOL
Would you like to know more?
Date Modified: 09-08-2025
