Reflections
David Row
July 16 - Sept. 5, 2026
Opening Reception: Thurs., July 16, 5 - 7pm
Artist Talk: Thurs., Aug. 13, 6pm
ARTIST STATEMENT
FEATURED ARTIST
How abstract is it?
Although I am what is referred to as an ‘abstract painter,’ everything I do, experience, or think about, finds its way into the work. I had an interesting encounter years ago when someone I had never met, surprised me by commenting on the work, saying, “I guess you spend a lot of time on boats.” I had never considered making work that expressed my time on the water. But here it was: an objective viewer seeing an unintentional aspect of my life in the work.
When I first moved to New York I worked as a sheetrock taper to support my painting habit. I got to the point of being very good at it. The fact that this would define how I applied paint to the surface of my painting years later, again never occurred to me. Now the tools and the surface of the ‘mud’ have become ingrained in the painting. The colors I experienced in India as a teenager are still with me because they were vivid, strange, and different from those in my own visual culture, and therefore made a deep impression on me.
I never questioned that I was a physical person. My earliest memories are from a ballet class I took at four years old. I started skating at five. Strangely, the curvilinear aspect of my work often echoes the arcs made by skate blades on the ice. The experiences of conscious life are transformed into art. Experience is stored in our memory and our body, and those memories become raw material for the work. The paintings and objects I make are a result of what I have experienced, but transformed in a mysterious and ever surprising way. Culture is what we do and who we are. In my case the influences are unconsciously abstract.
Preview the Exhibition
(CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE)
