Dennis Hart has spent 18 years exaggerating people’s features for a living, but the biggest character at Hartsyfartsy’s Caricature Couch might be the man holding the marker.
With rectangular glasses perched on a prominent nose, a salt-and-pepper beard and a broad grin that seems perpetually on the verge of laughter, Hart looks at home among the outrageous faces covering the bright orange walls of his tiny studio at the Chattanooga Choo Choo.
He’s loud, talkative and armed with an ample supply of jokes and puns. His laughter comes easily, and his mouth rarely stops moving long enough for his drawing hand to catch up.
When a visitor mistakes a caricature of Laurie Strode, Jamie Lee Curtis’ character in “Halloween,” for Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler, Hart doesn’t take offense.
“I love that you said Steven Tyler, because I can see the resemblance, especially when he was younger, with the long hair and big lips,” Hart says.
Then he remembers another unfortunate resemblance.
“I had one of (wrestler) Ric Flair up there that someone called a pig,” he says with a burst of laughter. “I thought that was hilarious.”
For Hart, it’s all part of the fun. The 50-year-old artist has spent nearly two decades studying faces, learning to exaggerate their most distinctive features and capture something of the personalities behind them. Along the way, he’s discovered that his greatest satisfaction comes not from producing a technically accomplished drawing but from making someone laugh.
“I’ve always liked making art that brings people together,” he says.
At Hartsyfartsy’s Caricature Couch, customers can have their likenesses rendered in minutes or browse prints and stickers featuring original artwork. Hart and his wife, Mandy, also a caricature artist, operate the business with two newer artists, Steph and Amelia.
“Everything you see out here – the prints, the drawings and the stickers – we create ourselves,” Hart says, gesturing toward the display racks outside his shop in the hotel’s lobby. “None of it is AI-generated, and none of it comes from an outside distributor.”
Black-and-white caricatures cost $15 per person, drawings with gray shading cost $20 and full-color versions cost $30. A black-and-white drawing generally takes five to seven minutes, while color requires about 12.
“If I’m not running my mouth the whole time,” Hart says.
He laughs and acknowledges that such restraint almost never happens.
From math class to Disney
Hart’s artistic education began, appropriately enough, with a joke.
“I drew as a kid and all through high school,” the Lakeland, Florida, native says. “When people ask me where I learned to draw, I always joke that it was in math class.”
While drawing offered an escape from schoolwork, Hart never imagined he could make a living doing it. Instead, he pursued graphic design, which seemed a more practical application of his artistic interests.
“That’s what they tell artists to do,” he says. “They say, ‘Have you tried marketing or graphic design? You know, something that will actually make money?’”
He worked professionally as a graphic designer for about five years before discovering caricature art and becoming fascinated with its expressive lines and exaggerated features.
“I fell in love with how it looked,” he says.
His curiosity eventually led him to a Craigslist advertisement seeking caricature artists. Rather than apply for the job outright, Hart arranged to meet someone in the business at Disney’s All-Star Sports Resort in Orlando.
He arrived wearing jeans and a Thundercat’s T-shirt, expecting an informal conversation. Instead, a towering man stood up in an otherwise empty cafeteria hallway and shouted, “Thundercats!”
The two hit it off, and the man asked Hart to draw him as the Hulk.
Hart remembers the resulting caricature as terrible. Nevertheless, two months later, he was drawing caricatures professionally at Disney.
“My line quality was bad. My likenesses were bad,” he says.
His personality, apparently, compensated for some of those deficiencies.
“I was definitely a personality hire,” Hart says, laughing at the memory. “I was told later by a colleague that they all hated me when I started because I was so bad.”
Hart didn’t take the criticism personally. He was delighted to be drawing for a living, and he threw himself into learning everything he could from the artists around him.
“I was soaking up everything,” he says. “I watched how the other artists worked, tried different techniques and experimented with colors.”
It was three years before he felt his work was decent, and today he shares a folder of those early drawings with the artists he trains, hoping they’ll understand that proficiency doesn’t arrive overnight.
“I tell the kids, ‘This is a job you have to be willing to suck at in front of people before you can get good at it,’” he says.
The art of exaggeration
Although caricature is often associated with enormous noses, protruding teeth and oversize ears, Hart considers it a more sophisticated art form than simply making people look ridiculous.
“Likeness is the most important thing,” he says. “But you also want to capture a person’s energy or personality in the drawing.”
Finding that essence begins with observation. Hart studies the shape of a person’s head, the relationships between facial features and the subtle distinctions that make one face different from another.
Even seemingly ordinary faces offer something worth exaggerating.
Hart has a name for the hypothetical customer whose appearance presents few obvious opportunities: Johnny Mayonnaise.
But he insists that closer inspection always reveals something distinctive, whether it’s a slightly flared nostril, an unusually shaped chin or a subtle difference in the curve of a cheek.
“You really have to look and see what makes them them,” he says. “Even if their features seem ordinary, there’s always something distinctive you can exaggerate.”
Experience has made those decisions nearly instantaneous, but caricature also requires judging how much exaggeration a customer will enjoy. Some people want something cute and flattering, while others encourage him to make them as ridiculous as possible.
Hart is especially merciless with people close to him, including his wife. He once turned a caricature of her into a sticker and slapped it on his tumbler before she’d even seen the drawing.
“She laughed her butt off,” he recalls.
A permanent place to play
After several years at Disney, Hart began traveling the fair circuit, drawing caricatures at events along the East Coast.
“My life became one fair after another,” Hart says. “A lot of us made our living traveling the state fair circuit, saving up as much as we could during the busy season because business was pretty much dead in the winter.”
The couple eventually settled in Knoxville before moving to Chattanooga about four years ago to be closer to clients such as the Tennessee Aquarium and Rock City. They also began selling their artwork at local markets, gradually building a following.
But after years of hauling equipment to fairs and festivals, Hart wanted something more permanent. At 50, he wasn’t enthusiastic about continuing to set up temporary booths well into his 60s.
A visit to the Chattanooga Choo Choo eventually led him to the small storefront that became Hartsyfartsy’s Caricature Couch.
The space was even smaller than the 10-by-10-foot tent he’d used at festivals, but Hart and Mandy liked the idea of creating an intimate studio with the atmosphere of a living room in a place where people were looking for entertainment.
The studio opened about a year and a half ago, giving the couple a permanent home for a business that had spent much of its existence on the road.
When the joke isn’t funny
Not everyone appreciates seeing their features exaggerated, and Hart has encountered his share of unhappy customers over the years.
“I’ve had people tear up my drawings, crumple them right in front of me, and even had kids tell me I’m the worst artist they’ve ever seen,” he says.
One young customer disliked her caricature so much that she rejected it, even though her mother thought it was adorable.
Hart agreed with the mother. “I thought it was super cute,” he says. “So I put it on display.”
The rejected drawing now hangs in his studio.
Such reactions are uncommon these days, Hart says, but they underscore the delicate balance between exaggerating someone’s appearance and making that person uncomfortable.
He and Mandy generally try to accommodate unhappy customers without turning the situation into an argument. Hart has developed a thick skin, but he also understands that customers sometimes arrive with insecurities about their appearance.
His goal isn’t to embarrass anyone; it’s to help them enjoy an experience that requires a willingness to laugh at themselves.
“Part of our job is getting people there,” he says.
The laughter is the point
When Hart began drawing caricatures professionally in 2008, his ambitions centered on mastering the art itself. He still wants to improve, but after 18 years, his priorities have shifted.
“Years ago, I would’ve said it was all about the art,” he says. “I wanted to master caricature – and I still do. But now I think my role is to make people laugh.”
That philosophy comes to life when two older women settle onto the couch for black-and-white caricatures. Both seem a little apprehensive about what Hart might do with their faces, but his steady stream of jokes soon puts them at ease.
At one point, he encourages one of the women to strike a pose.
“Give me Rose from ‘Titanic,’” he says.
She obliges, leaning back on the couch like Kate Winslet’s character in the scene where Jack sketches her. It’s the sort of spontaneous silliness Hart thrives on, and by the time he finishes drawing, the women seem more excited than nervous about seeing the results.
Then comes the reveal.
The women study their caricatures with expressions of disbelief, then begin to laugh, pointing out the features Hart has exaggerated and marveling at their own distorted likenesses. Their amusement grows as they take in the details, giving Hart the reaction he’d hoped for.
“Anytime I can goof off with someone and make them laugh that hard, I’m all in,” he says. “Nothing beats that for me.”
For a man who’s spent nearly two decades exaggerating people’s faces, there’s something fitting about the fact that his favorite expression is the one he doesn’t have to draw.
He just has to make it happen.