TAKE A RIDE IN PRESTON'S HEAD
Written by Lawrence Cosentino   
CITY PULSE Magazine - Tuesday, 11 April 2006

Thoughts that never occur to anyone else occur to Dennis Preston all the time.
Suppose Preston is bent over his pad, sketching a head — as the graphic artist and caricature master almost always is — and becomes bored with the picture. Other artists would throw the drawing away, but not Preston. I thought, ‘What if I turned this drawing upside down and had some guys riding in his nose and mouth?” he says in a low chuckle. Head rides are Preston’s stock in trade. Usually, his imagination is fettered by the need for to conform to some commercial or physical reality, but that’s not the case in “The Whoa Show,” his new exhibition at Gone Wired Café. This is the most unfiltered Preston show ever, a grotesque id romp that changes the viewer’s perception of many things, from grudges to big toes.
Sometimes Preston’s thought process is unfathomable, even after he explains it. Take his drawing of an uneasy couple trying to ignore the hallux from hell — a huge, sentient toe. “I started with this guy with tall hair,” Preston says. “Then I thought maybe I should make it look like he’s trying to ignore a big ugly toe. The toe is saying, ‘Hi, how’s it goin’?’”
Anyone who crosses Preston’s path may end up in his ever-growing pile of sketchbooks, wrestling with a funky monster or sprouting a second head, with a face like a pile of bicycle tires and doorknobs. “I’m inspired by people I've seen.” he says. As a people-watcher and caricaturist, Preston, who drew this week’s City Pulse cover, doesn’t blink at emphasizing ethnic or racial characteristics. Once, he recalls, a magazine aimed at a black audience interviewed him about illustrating for them. “The man said, ‘You’re not afraid to let loose on us, are you?’” Preston says. “I was drawing the noses and the lips big, and he liked that. All the other artists interviewed were drawing white people and coloring them brown.”
Preston’s roots as a ‘60s rock-poster artist shine through in a couple of the “Whoa Show” works, including a depiction of “Stairway to Heaven” that is anything but.
There’s actually a touch of class in this grossout cavalcade, if you know where to look. One whole subset of pictures follows the footsteps of 19th-century masters who built visual puzzles by hiding faces within faces. The lips and teeth of a face, for example, form a second face, with another face inside that. Hidden mouths and eyes are strewn throughout Preston’s work.
“Out of all the art I do, this is what I like to do best,” Preston says. “I’m doodling and just letting my mind go.”