C. David Swanson

First Street, Wilsall, oil, $3200

C. David Swanson is a western contemporary realist, who works in oils, watercolor and charcoal. He and his family have lived in Livingston, Montana for over 17 years. David has exhibited frequently in Livingston and Bozeman, as well as in Billings, Helena, Missoula, Cody, Jackson, Chicago and Santa Fe. He has a BFA from Montana State University, and has done several artist-in-residencies and workshops in Park County.
His formal fine art education began in Chicago at the Art Institute (SAIC), but after two years he abandoned university for a career in rock & roll. However, his art education continued to be poured into him as he worked for twenty more years as a professional singer-songwriter, musician and recording artist, both in Chicago and Los Angeles, continually consuming a steady diet of Pop, graphic, and fine art, and the whole aesthetic milieu of the pop culture du jour. During these years, he periodically worked as an architectural illustrator (from age eighteen), which served not only to support his burgeoning musical and performing aspirations, but kept him continually in the visual arts; drawing, painting and doing graphic design, such as logos and record covers, until such time, in 1997, he decided and undertook to make a career change to fine art, as a painter.

"My goal always is to represent scenes and subjects that capture my gaze, lay a hand on my soul, so to speak, causing me to pause and see; then to paint them as faithfully and passionately as possible, with all the energy and skill I can muster. Occasionally, I create something which, in my eyes, is beautiful; reflecting and/or refracting, by my lens somehow, the beauty of creation; adding hopefully to the sum of beauty in the world. If one must obey the impulse to create something, this seems like a valid objective.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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, or 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 methods 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. All this is reborn, or lives again, each time a viewer experiences the painting. That these paintings assume a documentary, or even historical, quality is a consequence of this method and myy personal style, and of the alchemy of painting itself. "
- C. David Swanson

Vertical Divider