GARY T. KUBOTA / GKUBOTA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Maui artist David Sandell sorted through illustrations in his studio Wednesday in preparation for the opening of his art show in Wailuku yesterday. Sandell has drawings and paintings of Wailuku town dating back to the 1970s.
Artist casts unique
eye on MauiStylized caricatures showcase
a Wailuku from a different era
WAILUKU >> Some buildings in Wailuku no longer stand as they still do in David Sandell's illustrations.
Many of the people in his drawings have either died or faded into obscurity.
Sandell's drawings and paintings look back at Wailuku town over the past 30 years.
But they're not done with a photographic eye or reverence for detail, but are his own stylized caricatures of the people and places of a town that once was the center of commerce on Maui.
"Some things are spacey and over the top," Sandell said.
Sandell, 50, is having an art showing at Calabash Pottery on the northeast corner of Central Avenue and Vineyard Street through the end of this month.
The illustrations and paintings are views of Wailuku from Sandell's perspective, and also include some of his commercial works, including portraits of the Beatles and Jack Nicholson.
He's also produced a booklet of his illustrations of Wailuku town, including the former Vineyard Tavern, the Tong temple before it collapsed, and an unobstructed view of Iao Valley before the development of One Main Plaza.
Sandell developed his art while working as a cartoonist at the now defunct alternative newspaper The Maui Sun from 1975 through 1980.
"He was just a young guy who came from nowhere. That was the hippie era," recalled Don Graydon, publisher of The Maui Sun.
Graydon paid Sandell $50 for each cover of the weekly newspaper.
"He would be with his little marker pen, changing them just as he's handing them to you. It was fun. He was into his art. He lived his art. He's really one of a kind," Graydon said.
Like the alternative weeklies of the era, Sandell's early drawings often have a tongue-in-cheek view of conventional life and established authority, such as the illustration of the late Maui Mayor Hannibal Tavares in a Mount Rushmore-style against Iao Valley.
Graydon recalled Sandell creating a silk screen shirt entitled, "Noriega Blues Band" and featuring deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega playing a guitar.
There is also an irreverent illustration of renowned sumo wrestler Jesse Kuhaulua defying gravity and floating above his hometown street and stores of Happy Valley. In the same painting are Winston Churchill, a woman riding a horse, a cartoonish-looking man of wealth and a large cat on the top of a building.
Some of the caricatures in his paintings seem out of place and time, like an assortment of newcomers to Maui, sometimes giving his art a surreal offbeat atmosphere.
Sandell, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley in California and moved to Maui in 1973, said he enjoyed the "hippie" atmosphere on the Valley Isle.
Although he looks like a beachcomber -- sleeveless aloha shirt, slippers, and splattered spots of dried paint on his brown pants -- his life is more settled than when he drove a taxi and washed dishes while doing illustrations in the 1980s.
He lives in a cottage in Wailuku with his wife, Virginia, who teaches special education classes at Baldwin High School and is an actress and stage manager in local theatrical productions.
His art studio is a converted garage.
Sandell said he's been fortunate enough to sell his art over the past 15 years and likes living in and painting scenes of Wailuku.
He said Wailuku has some of the oldest and most interesting buildings on Maui and the residents are courteous.
"I like Wailuku because the weather's flawless, and when I wake up in the morning, 10 people will say good morning and look like they mean it," he said.
