Fatherhood Quote by Marc Davis

A “rainbow-chaser” is a romantic euphemism with a sting in it: someone forever sprinting toward color and promise, never quite arriving. Marc Davis, an artist who helped define the glossy optimism of mid-century American animation, chooses a phrase that sounds almost childlike, like a storybook nickname. That softness matters. It lets him describe a complicated father - possibly restless, impractical, charismatic, or chronically unavailable - without turning the line into an indictment.

The intent feels double: affection on the surface, emotional bookkeeping underneath. “Something of a” is the tell. It’s an English-language shrug that signals understatement and self-protection, the verbal equivalent of keeping your hands in your pockets. Davis isn’t saying his father was a dreamer; he’s implying a pattern: chasing the next horizon, the next scheme, the next reinvention. The rainbow is desire with good lighting. The chase is the cost to everyone who has to live in real weather.

Contextually, the phrase lands in a 20th-century American mythology of aspiration: the idea that a better life is always just over there, if you hustle hard enough and believe hard enough. For an artist, that mythology is both fuel and hazard. Creative people do, in fact, chase rainbows for a living - they pursue images, moods, worlds. Davis’s line quietly asks what happens when that temperament is a parent’s defining trait.

It works because it refuses melodrama. Instead of “absent,” “selfish,” or “failed,” he picks a metaphor that preserves dignity while still naming the ache: a father admired for his light, remembered for his distance.