David Nelson makes large acrylic process-based paintings with an emphasis on unconventional method and pointillistic/optical color mixing. His main concern is a philosophical balance of opposites: control and freedom, order and chaos, mechanical and organic, intention and occurrence. His most...
Read MoreDavid Nelson makes large acrylic process-based paintings with an emphasis on unconventional method and pointillistic/optical color mixing. His main concern is a philosophical balance of opposites: control and freedom, order and chaos, mechanical and organic, intention and occurrence.
His most recent ‘Incarnations: Garden Variety’ paintings use the grid of process color separation and a hand application of puddles of clear acrylic to disrupt/enhance the ‘reality’ of a photographic image. These monumental nudes —6 meters tall— with intentionally “everyday people” body types and sensuous finger-painted surface are both disorienting and inviting, and express the complexity of being human.
Nelson says, “We are multidimensional beings: spirit, soul (mind, emotions, will) and body. But all that complexity can only be expressed through our bodies. Who we are stays within us unless we make something — a speech, a book, a dance, a painting, a song, a visit. The human experience means bringing our unseen into where it can be received some way by other bodies. And something is always lost in translation. So life is always a beautiful, frustrating exchange of partial messages, garbled transmissions, incomplete sentences.”
Nelson lives in Dublin, New Hampshire, USA and exhibits nationally and internationally. He has attended artist’s residencies in Johnson, VT, USA, Gothenburg, Sweden, and Venice, Italy.
