David Swanson
Artist C. David Swanson is an award winning western contemporary-realist painter, working in oils, watercolor and charcoal. He and his family have lived in Livingston, Montana for over 20 years. Since beginning his professional fine arts career in 1997, Swanson has exhibited frequently and shown in several states around the country. His paintings are in private, corporate and public collections. He has a BFA from Montana State University.
Prior to his fine art career, he worked for many years as a professional singer-songwriter, musician and recording artist, both in Chicago and Los Angeles; and as an architectural illustrator.
Opening in late May of 2010, Swanson produced an exhibition of paintings about railroad workers titled Sweat and Steel, which toured a number of the Montanaʼs museums and art centers, including Custer County Art & Heritage Center and the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, concluding in March of 2012. He paints a wide variety of subjects — architectural, figurative, landscape and portraits, and plein air.
My best paintings are metaphors. Although they document the temporary present (the “contemporary”), by imparting to them the right mood, they allude to the eternal also. Sometimes a painting of quite lasting value can be created in this way.
From time to time, visual moments occur that, though fleeting, stay with me. They repeatedly call to me to interact with them by painting. This, for better or worse, can involve a broad range of subjects. I do not consider myself primarily an architectural, landscape or figurative painter, but merely a painter. While some subjects lend themselves readily to painterly interpretation, others require more strenuous reconstruction or reinvention.
The actuality of a particular scene having already been distorted—abstracted—by my own lens, as it were, I try to express with the skills at my disposal the subject in its essential qualities to the viewer as realistically as makes sense to me, understanding that what constitutes realism in painting can be treated and appreciated variously. But apart from the traditional method of converting an experience “in the round” to an experience “on canvas in paint,” I choose to leave further abstraction to others.
So, in some detail, with use of the plastic potentials of the painter’s art (i.e., color, contrast, form, line, etc.), I compose a unified representation as best I can of the view and subject that captivated me in the first place, in an attempt to share the emotional meaning, albeit through an alternative medium; and, in a sense, set it in time. That these paintings assume a documentary, or even historical, quality is a consequence of this method and my personal style, and of the alchemy of painting itself.
Visit Website: https://www.davidswansonart.com/
Prior to his fine art career, he worked for many years as a professional singer-songwriter, musician and recording artist, both in Chicago and Los Angeles; and as an architectural illustrator.
Opening in late May of 2010, Swanson produced an exhibition of paintings about railroad workers titled Sweat and Steel, which toured a number of the Montanaʼs museums and art centers, including Custer County Art & Heritage Center and the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, concluding in March of 2012. He paints a wide variety of subjects — architectural, figurative, landscape and portraits, and plein air.
My best paintings are metaphors. Although they document the temporary present (the “contemporary”), by imparting to them the right mood, they allude to the eternal also. Sometimes a painting of quite lasting value can be created in this way.
From time to time, visual moments occur that, though fleeting, stay with me. They repeatedly call to me to interact with them by painting. This, for better or worse, can involve a broad range of subjects. I do not consider myself primarily an architectural, landscape or figurative painter, but merely a painter. While some subjects lend themselves readily to painterly interpretation, others require more strenuous reconstruction or reinvention.
The actuality of a particular scene having already been distorted—abstracted—by my own lens, as it were, I try to express with the skills at my disposal the subject in its essential qualities to the viewer as realistically as makes sense to me, understanding that what constitutes realism in painting can be treated and appreciated variously. But apart from the traditional method of converting an experience “in the round” to an experience “on canvas in paint,” I choose to leave further abstraction to others.
So, in some detail, with use of the plastic potentials of the painter’s art (i.e., color, contrast, form, line, etc.), I compose a unified representation as best I can of the view and subject that captivated me in the first place, in an attempt to share the emotional meaning, albeit through an alternative medium; and, in a sense, set it in time. That these paintings assume a documentary, or even historical, quality is a consequence of this method and my personal style, and of the alchemy of painting itself.
Visit Website: https://www.davidswansonart.com/