Meet Pittsburgh portrait artist Dan O’Donnell
Dan O’Donnell began his artistic journey creating technical artwork and painting commercial illustrations for American Greetings card company. But after a 40-year hiatus when he dove into other ventures, including a stint as Art Director at GNC and eventually starting his own graphic and web design firm, O’Donnell started painting again a few years ago under the name Faj.
“COVID kind of left me in a place of ‘What do I do?’ I always said, ‘I’m gonna go back to painting, I’m gonna try to get back to this,” O’Donnell says, “and I think that combination of years of kind of having left it alone and having extra time, I started again.”
The walls inside his studio at Direct Axis, his North Hills design firm, are covered with his paintings, featuring lifelike portraits created on canvas with acrylic paints. The subjects range from celebrities, like David Bowie and John Lennon, to models he saw on Instagram and asked for permission to create a painting of based on their photographs.
In late 2020, after painting 55 “practice portraits,” he began taking commissions and, in 2021, was the recipient of a $2,000 Creative Entrepreneur Accelerator grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. But not all of his payments have been financial.
As a self-taught artist who graduated with a visual communications degree from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, getting recognized for his work means the world to him, especially when that fame was from one of his favorite indie musicians, Arrow de Wilde, the lead singer of Star Crawler.
After attending one of their gigs, O’Donnell painted her portrait based on photos he took at the show.
“So I posted it on Twitter, and she saw this, and she said she loved it, and I was like, ‘Hey, this is awesome, I’m just starting painting, and there’s this girl who I think is fantastic, and she loves my painting,” he says.
Recently, his commissioned work includes a project with Demaskus Theater Collective, a national service-oriented collective of artists and administrators seeking to make known the messages of the marginalized. With the collective, O’Donnell was commissioned to paint staff members, which will soon be featured as non-traditional headshots on their website.
When taking a portrait, O’Donnell says his process starts by either searching for a reference image or, his preference, taking a photograph of the subject himself.
“Then I go into Photoshop, and I’ll do a little bit of brightening or whatever so I have a good image,” he says, “then just draw it out on canvas and start painting.”
His portraits average from 10-15 hours over a week to create, and he always posts the finished product on his Instagram account @faj_dano.
Why Faj? “Years ago, my daughter said “You are my Fajjah” (father),” he explains on his website. “Fajjah quickly turned into Faj and now my entire family calls me Faj.”
Behind-the-scenes of creating a portrait:
I was able to meet with Dan for a portrait he made of me, and the process was amazing to watch. He took my photos outdoors in the sun and shade, surrounded by trees. We then went back indoors to make sure he got enough photos, and he picked the one he wanted to work with the most.
Like his other paintings, he made sure the photo was perfect and then went to his canvas. To be honest, at first, I had to trust the process since the first progress photo I got sent didn’t have a lot of features except the face. But then, when I saw the ending photo, I was amazed at how it went from only a face to every feature. His style is very realistic, and I loved getting to see the final product of my portrait.