Events

Dan’s paintings often include combinations of anatomical imagery, memorial sculpture, romantic symbolism, and iconography encountered on numerous trips throughout Europe. Most of these paintings begin on deep box-like supports that stand out from the wall, asserting themselves in the viewer’s space and suggesting the physical weightiness associated with monuments and memorial sculpture. Materials like wax, tar, wood, and heavily textured fabrics are used to achieve an elemental connection between the viewer and the work. The processes of building, weathering, eroding and layering are important to the work’s identity. These processes create histories that can be excavated, traced, and experienced by the viewer. These visceral paintings are meant to both recall and engage the physical body. Through a mixed use of painterly languages, I am attempting to make works that explore the nature of mortality, express a sense of loss, and address mankind’s desire to locate spiritual meaning.

Inspired both by an earlier series of small Star Wars paintings suggested by his son, and by witnessing him drawing on book covers as a small child, Dan recently began developing a series of mixed media paintings on found books. Says Dan about the work “Physicality has always been a strong element in my paintings. I love that when I pick up one of my “book paintings”, I have that familiar, meaningful, intimate feeling of holding a book in my hands. These are intimate objects from the start, and that intimacy carries over into my approach to making the paintings and choosing the subject matter. They have afforded me an opportunity to break from my typical style of painting, and introduce new techniques and ideas into my work. These works celebrate the object qualities of books, and are meant to reveal new narratives even as they conceal the original object/text. While some have recently been shown in various group exhibitions, I am grateful to the KBAC for providing an opportunity to exhibit them as a series for the first time.”