Dan Bellini, originally a full-time professional blues musician who jammed with the likes of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddly, B.B. King and many others, is now a freelance muralist, painter and activist.
“I've been preaching to friends for 15 years about political corruption and the chipping away of our democracy by corporate interests who use their vast wealth to buy our politicians like the cheap whores that they are," Bellini said. "When Occupy came along, I was like, finally!"
“On September 17, while watching the livestream of the first Occupy march, I decided to try to Occupy Facebook through art," he continued. "My personal profile picture was always Charlie Brown. So I repainted Charlie Brown wearing the Guy Fawkes mask and made it my new profile picture. I then offered to anyone who wanted to 'protest corporate greed' to tell me their favorite cartoon character and I would put a mask on him. All I asked in return was a promise that they would use it as their Facebook profile picture. The response was overwhelming, and soon there were hundreds of people using my Occupy paintings as their avatars. I've done almost 300 of them so far and I'm still getting requests. I started with only cartoon characters but eventually branched out to include famous paintings, people and TV and movie characters”.
Bellini has posted more than 260 of his paintings on his Facebook page and allows his images to be used to promote the causes of Occupy Wall Street. To see more of Dan Belllini’s images, please visit his online gallery.
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