Yet, the art of Donald Merrick was not Domino Art, not by any stretch of the imagination. He was living the predictable life of a successful academic artist, complete with a wife and increasingly impressive university positions, culminating in his appointment as head of the art department at Farleigh-Dickerson University in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1963. The art of Donald Merrick gradually became recognized through the years. Then, stepping outside the cloisters of academia, he moved to New York in 1960 to be the Art Director of Arts Magazine. He taught art at the University of Missouri and the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He earned a bachelor’s degree in art at Chicago Art Institute and a Masters at the University of New Mexico (1955). He traveled over much of the country, usually “on my thumb, which added a real taste for the bizarre.” Strong among the store-house of memories collected during these years are recollections of the lumberjacks he worked with in a logging camp near Mount Rainier in Washington. Before long he was trying hard to capture these subtle details of macho costume and attitude in the drawings of men he’d been creating in pen and ink since he was ten.Īfter high school the wanderlust hit, and he spent a number of years gathering first-hand experiences and collecting visual data to use in his drawings. He still remembers the excitement of his first discovery of the baskets that lay semi-hidden under those crisp khaki outfits.
Topping the list were the uniforms of the recruits at a nearby Army base.
The miners’ battered engineer’s boots covered with red mud “made my heart pound long before my dick did,” he recalls. Molded-to-muscle leather jackets worn by the iron miners in his home town turned Donald on long before he was old enough to make any sexual connection between studs and leather. He died of AIDS-related complications in New York City on 14th October 1990. Domino, Donald Merrick, was born in Crosby, Minnesota on 11th August 1929.
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