... the leading practitioner of piggyback art. He takes paintings that he considers boring or incomplete, and inserts nuns, flying jesuses, flame people, or demons, changing the meaning of the composition in ways to suit his visions, to coopt the elements and create his own worlds.

<img src="www.eddiebreen.com" alt="(c) www.eddiebreen.com/gallery"width=400>
[/] eddiebreen.com

Born 45 years ago in Natick, MA, Breen didn't start painting until relatively recently. " Over the years I've worked a variety of jobs, but never picked up a paint brush - except when, as a bike messenger in Boston, I felt the need to fill the inspection certificate holders in elevators with my own artistic expression."

Breen made a sketch of a bass in pen and ink, photo-copied hundreds of them, then painted them in a variety of ways - 'burning bass of moses', 'bass attack', 'bassass backwards' and placed them in the inspection certificate holders of the elevators he encountered while delivering packages around the city. He found they dissappeared quite rapidly as they were collected by tenants of the buildings or simply thrown away by the building maintenance people, and he became known among the other messengers as the 'Bassman.'