Daddy-O

the long version

Behind the often outlandish, always fantastic, artistic endeavors of Texas artist Bob "Daddy-O" Wade (second cousin to Roy Rogers) lies a man whose talent and view of the world are as big as Texas itself. When it comes to creating his works, Daddy-O is just as liable to use a pistol as a paintbrush. Here are scores of stories that span a twenty-five-year period, exposing the madness behind the methodology. Daddy-O adopts a Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn approach to recruiting enough colorful sidekicks and resources to create his larger-than-life projects, such as a forty-foot iguana perched on the top of New York City's Lone Star Cafe, the Giant Dancing Frogs of Dallas, a machine-gunned Mardi Gras art van, or a seventy-foot multi-ton saxophone fashioned from oil-field pipes, hubcaps, beer kegs, a surfboard, and an upside-down Volkswagen Beetle.