By Jeff Lewis
Flip through any high school yearbook and you will invariably locate them. Sandwiched between the frumpy girl with big glasses and the awkward-looking boy with tousled hair. Sprinkled amid the teenage world of locker bays, cheerleaders, jocks and moody kids smoking pot underneath football-field bleachers stand the class clowns, smart-asses and ne’er-do-wells.
Under favourite memories they might list mooning the gym teacher. Career aspirations are adroitly limited to getting rich and, simply, if a little mysteriously, cheese. Seldom will you read about their career trajectories in the business pages of a national newspaper. In conversation, accounts of their lives will take on the tones of a cautionary tale rather than an inspirational speech. Dave Arnold might fall into this camp except for one detail: He was kicked out of high school long before graduation day. “I was getting zeroes in every single course, because I wasn’t doing anything,” he recalls. “I was just farting around.”
Today, the 29-year-old visual artist ekes out a living in Montreal, painting storefront windows with hand-lettered signs. In many ways, his is a tale of contradictions. His resume, for one, reads like an almanac of terrible choices. There was the stint as a plumber’s assistant, another as a dish washer at a diner-chain owned by Celine Dion, followed by a gig at a deli and after that a stretch apprenticing as a carpenter. “After a couple of years of stuff like that I realized this is what people were warning me about. These are the kinds of jobs a high school dropout gets.”
Yet there’s something to Arnold’s story. It successfully throws a giant spanner in the popular narrative of dropouts, the one where they end up working as grunts in lumber camps, on oil rigs or else wind up on the side of milk cartons in grainy black-and-white photos. Can a perennial shit-disturber make good in the world? The short answer may be yes, but the longer response is, in Arnold’s case, unorthodox.
“When I was messing around in school, it wasn’t to make a point, or because I thought I could do things my way. I think it was just the entertainment value of trying to turn myself into the centre of attention, just for my own kicks.”
Indeed, his departure from academia had as much to do with lousy grades as a perverse talent for infuriating school officials. Take his unceremonious departure from the high school art program. For years leading up to his expulsion, Arnold had been driving the art teachers at his suburban high school mad. Whatever project they assigned, he completed. But his participation came with a caveat: from Grade 9 through to Grade 11, a fascination with scatological humor would inform nearly everything he drew, designed or built. He sullied lessons in three-point perspective and ruined classes on Roman aesthetics. Pastel drawings were tainted, classic paintings debased. Finally, exasperated with his pupil’s capacity for filth, the last in a string of art teachers gave up. “Technically you’re quite skilled, but you cannot keep doing this,” he pleaded. “You’re in Grade 11 now. We want you to step it up.”
Any normal student would have got the message. But temptation is a tricky stimulus. The assignment that pushed the faculty to the brink began simply enough. Build a set of Russian doll-inspired shapes – just the thing to get a wayward student on the right track. Almost immediately, though, Arnold resolved to design, sculpt and fire a cartoonish pile of dog droppings using clay. In keeping with the Russian-doll theme, the project would consist of one Dairy Queen-like swirl inside another inside another. As cover for his deceit, he spent class hours building a simple series of cubes, each smaller than the other so that they fit together snugly. At home, he worked into the night on his secret masterpiece, eventually converting his family’s oven into a kiln so he could glaze and fire the sculpture in anticipation of “mark day.”
Disbelief does not begin to describe the look on the teacher’s face when he spotted the lumpy – though technically sound – fecal statuette. “It was the most priceless thing I’ve ever seen,” Arnold recalls, chuckling at the memory. “He couldn’t compute what he was looking at.” The school’s principal and vice-principal were equally stunned. “They couldn’t understand what would make a person do this.” True to their word, school officials expelled their stubborn charge from the art program. Eventually, they kicked him out of school altogether.
It wasn’t until Arnold fell in with a local carpenter that the word education took on any tangible meaning. He found the immediate rewards of framing a house, or helping renovate a kitchen far outweighed the more ethereal perks of acing an English paper or math test. “I think that’s where I actually started paying attention to what people smarter than me were saying.”
Still, the wages were lousy and the work was backbreaking. In the fall of 2004, fed up with carpentry, Arnold moved with a handful of friends from Toronto to Montreal. They set up shop in a converted loft and slept in homemade beds. While his companions focused on growing a boutique design agency based in Montreal’s trendy Plateau district, the terrible jobs kept piling up for Arnold. “The first winter was a nightmare of living on hotdogs and processed cheese,” he says.
Perhaps inevitably, he fell back on drawing and a childhood obsession with Archie comics. (Whatever his shortcomings in the classroom, Arnold had been doodling from an early age. Teachers rarely doubted that he knew his way around a black-tipped pen). That led to a series of gallery installations, including one titled Teenage Nudes, which more or less consisted of sketches of Betty and Veronica in alluring poses. Shortly after, he parlayed a rudimentary skill with a paintbrush into designing storefront signs for local merchants. Clients to date include upscale Montreal restaurants and clothiers, a flagship Urban Outfitters store and, most recently, a mobile taco vendor. Says Arnold, “People are starting to notice that I have a bit of style that I’m doing – not because I’m aiming for a style, but I’m falling into the stuff I’m comfortable doing and I like doing.”
His advice to entrepreneurs, students and would-be dropouts is to keep an open mind. Don’t be afraid of pursuing new ideas, he adds. “And don’t get too depressed if they turn out to be terrible. Just try the next idea that shows up. That’s the approach that I’ve been running on, and it seems to work about 50 per cent of the time.”
Category: Work
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Ah! I remember him well. Scouting will NEVER be the same :-)
You forgot the part where dave stumbled into an audition without an agent or being on the union and got the part in a us national juicyfruit comercial and later starred in a handful of herbal essences ads then left it all and moved to nicaragua. I know it sounds like I’m making it up but I’m not go ask him.