Saturday, February 6, 2010

"Fall at the Circus"


Mixed media: acrylic, metal (recycled cookie tin), scrap wood. You can't tell from the photo, but the sword blades, barbell, cannon, cannon ball, whip and misc. parts are 3 dimensional. The piece is 42 inches long. The inspiration: a semi-random doodle I made during a department meeting at SAS years ago. (Sold!)

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DAVE'S ARTIST STATEMENT - Sep. 2009 (Top)

After 20 years: bringing my personal “corporate graffiti” to life in 2009.

Twenty years in a fulltime software developer job can really eat into ones creative art time! The result for me: my ‘art time’ uncontrollably crept into my work hours; stream-of-conscious doodles flowed onto paper handouts during boring staff meetings or onto memo pads during periods of concentration while on conference calls with customers. With pen or pencil in hand, each line or shape drawn after the first was based on the lines and shapes drawn before it and the white space around them with little or no thought as to what would be drawn next. Senses of balance, movement and pattern – plus the subconscious – determined the path to the final mark on the page. The results were mostly contemporary and somewhat surreal scenes made up of inter-related lines, curves, geometric shapes and shading.

In the plane manila folder labeled ‘Doodles’ in my desk drawer, I tucked away quite a collection of pages tagged with these bits of graffiti. With my recent retirement from my software job, I now aim to bring the best of these to life in a form I can share with others. I’ll leave it for the viewer to concoct their own stories about the art or [feel free!] to analyze the subconscious of this former-programmer!

The medium for my work may be acrylic or mixed media, digital compositions, or sculptures of metal and/or wood. Whether I am working on a spontaneous piece from scratch or one derived from one of my doodles or photographs, the effort may be a quick one-afternoon expression - or a drawn out and pain-staking process.

Influences? Looking over past and present work, I see that my childhood discovery of Joan Miró seems to have deeply affected my subconscious! No telling how different my style would be today had page 6 been missing from the book “100 of the World’s Most Beautiful Paintings” (copyright 1966) on my family’s fireside book shelf.
DAVE'S BIO (Top)

In fourth grade... I sold my first piece of art: a colored drawing of a horse, for 25 cents. I recall that was good for two ice cream sandwiches in the school cafeteria!

Studied art through high school and college while going for degrees in Physics and Computer Science some 25 years ago. Did computer programming until recently, and (my mistake!) did little art besides business graphics during that time.

Recent work: A trip to some Raleigh art galleries in '08 re-ignited my desire to produce art. Getting a piece juried into a show at the VAE months later (and receiving honorable mention) was encouraging.

Mediums: ceramics, oil, acrylic, pencil, mixed media, digital photography/compositions

Influenced most by: Miro & Dali

Memberships: VAE Gallery in Raleigh; Cary Photographic Artists

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