It doesn’t get much humbler than the humble napkin, whose job is to absorb your sloppy mess and vanish.
But local painter, illustrator and graphic designer Patrick Flynn has exalted the paper rag into a proper canvas for his masterpieces. Or, anyway, for one creative dad’s daily message of lunchtime love.
“It’s just a little, tangible way of making my kids feel special,” Flynn said.
It’s a little more than that. For as long as they’ve been packing lunches into brown bags, parents have been tucking in sweet notes and Valentines too — but most parents don’t splurge on fine-quality paper napkins and spend as long as a couple of hours in the middle of the night decorating them with cartoon characters, superheroes, family pets and other amusements.
It’s just what a kid slogging through school needs in the middle of the day: a loving, laughing pick-me-up from home.
Now you can sample his kids’ delight. A wildly successful Kickstarter campaign has led to the creation of a new picture book called “Lunch Napkin Art” — and Flynn, 50, is pondering the irony that doodles on napkins have become his signature creative achievement.
And that’s OK, he said. Being a “serious artist” can mean a whole lot of staring at canvases, “trying to birth grand, profound, heavy things,” he said. “This is something you don’t have to think about. You just do it.”
Silly Darth
Flynn, who hails from Minneapolis, was always sure about being an artist. But that’s not the same as knowing what he’d do for a living. He earned a fine-arts degree in painting, got married and had a couple of kids — but then realized: “Whoops, I forgot to have a career.”
Flynn now works as an illustrator and software designer, and also started a successful artistic home business called Simply Silhouettes with his wife, Angela. He’s slowed down on painting, he said. But he’s never stopped doodling on whatever surface was at hand. It’s a holdover from his high school doodling days in the 1970s, he said — when the fledgling bass player was reading rock ‘n’ roll magazines and paying tribute in colored pens to highly visual acts like the rock band Kiss.
Nearly a decade ago, when daughter Molly was in kindergarten, Flynn doodled a Japanese cartoon character onto a napkin and slipped it into her lunch. It was “kind of cool” and nothing more, he thought. He had no idea he was starting something big.
But Molly loved it and asked for more. Flynn started doing regular black-and-white drawings for Molly and her older brother, Sean; those quick sketches evolved into full-color creations on good paper napkins (which cost “a lot more than you think,” he said).
Flip through the “Lunch Napkin Art” book and you’ll see all the stuff that growing kids have been into over the last decade, as lovingly skewed by a funny, artistic dad: puppies, monkeys, SpongeBob SquarePants and Rojo the Lllama; Star Wars characters and Hollywood superheroes donning ladylike hats and dresses, or rocking out on vintage electric guitars; best wishes for school sports teams; cartoon cakes on birthdays and a mathematical pie for “Pi Day”; and, Charlie Brown’s reassurance that Monday is OK — Squirt’s assertion (from “Finding Nemo”) that Friday is sweet — but best of all is the long-awaited day when Sesame Street’s Count announces “Zero! I count zero days left of school! Ah ha ha ha!”
Looking back over yearsworth of napkins, Flynn said, has been more revealing than he expected. “They were a snapshot of what the kids were into at the time; details of the pop-cultural landscape that all of us were a part of,” he wrote in the Kickstarter project description. “To be able to look at Sonic the Hedgehog or Grumpy Cat was to remember a little something about the kids themselves at various points in their lives.”
Flynn even started taking napkin art requests and creating surprises for his own friends. One year after Bob Meek, a Ridgefield High School music teacher, underwent an emergency heart transplant, Flynn illustrated a napkin with the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz” holding up his own special gift of a heart: “One year and still ticking.”
Surprise
Flynn has no idea how many napkins he has decorated across the years — maybe a thousand, he said.
But now Molly is 13 and Sean is 17, he said. Have those growing children started rolling their eyes while pulling Dad’s latest, cutest creations from their lunchboxes in front of all their friends, day after day?
“That’s the million-dollar question” that he doesn’t want to ask, Flynn admitted with a laugh. But then he added — he’s pretty sure his kids are still into this. His daughter recently revealed to him that she has not been smearing her artistic napkins with ketchup — but saving them all for years.
“I had no idea those still existed,” he said. “That was special.”
Flynn knows his empty nest days are not far off. That’ll be the right time to get back into painting in a big way, he said.
“I never expected this to take off, it was just something I was doing for my kids,” he said. “But things sometimes take on a life of their own.”
