Douglas Padgett
Artist Statement
May 2003
When I was in High School I worked for a while at a McDonalds in Cloverdale Indiana. I worked on the grill with a guy we called Devil Dave. We were goofing around one day with the plastic hand puppets that came with the happy meals when one of them fell on the grill and instantly melted into a contorted version of Ronald McDonald. When it was scraped it off it left a faint colorful wavy image of Ronald on the grill. Grilling hamburgers quickly gave way to visual mayhem. We covered the grill with all the different characters and then scraped them off. Hamburgler, the little French fry guys, the big purple guy covered the grill in a twisted psychedelic patterns. Our manager Jeff was a few years older than us and spent most of his shift in his office listening to Mott the Hoople. When he came out and noticed our work he said it was "amazing".
urnell, born and raised in Ohio, has been working as a professional