Piggyback Art

About 10 years ago, Chris Sammartano (whose nom de paint brush is Eddie Breen) stumbled upon a "horrible" painting at a flea market. He bought it for a dollar, picked up some art supplies, and got to work transforming the staid church scene into his own vibrant vision. An hour or so later, he had created "Piggyback Art," an exuberantly surreal style that reimagines found works with layers of text, color, and offbeat graphic elements. "I take incomplete paintings and insert nuns, flying Jesuses, flame people, politicians, or death elephants and change the meaning of the compositions in ways to suit my visions, to co-opt the elements, and create my own worlds," explains Breen, who has used the Internet to build an enthusiastic following of collectors from Antarctica to Texas. "I'm the guy in school who would sit in the library and deface photos of fashion models and politicians in magazines. I'd black out their teeth, white out their eyes, and scribble in devil horns and beards," notes Breen. "I guess I'm still doing it."