About the Artist : David L Friend

The Artist

All I am as an artist has come through the combination of encounters with life's experiences and my personal search for ways to relate to them through art. So as a self-taught artist I have used many methods and mediums, finding that the process of painting works very well for me. In my work. I mostly use oil and acrylic paints and like them both but have become especially enchanted with the properties of acrylics, which provide an excellent vehicle to create and express my ideas quickly and efficiently on canvas.

Over the years, I found happiness in painting traditional scenes of the peaceful and the tranquil from life and my imagination. Mostly I painted for myself, my friends and family. Those subjects, which I choose to paint, were a portrayal of a simpler life I longed for.

But since then, The realities of life, and upheavals in my life have caused me to revisit how I relate to everything. These things, and the experience of age, have created a change in my perspective which has had an influence in my artistic expression, creating a more distinctive and stronger artistic style, which I hope, you can see in these paintings.

As I paint more and more, I have continued to gain a greater appreciation of the dynamic interplay of shapes and colors in how they affect the perceptions of everything in our visual world. I see graphic presentations, like my art, as often being the key to revealing obscure things hidden in our brain and bring them into the light day. Thus the artwork gains power from the abstraction of forms shown in various ways. All this is intended to broaden the artistic voice in the work and speak more clearly to many people.

The outcome of all this has been that in many of the paintings, they will often become composed of multiple elements that may convey an attitude of motion, which can require aditional time to more fully appreciate what is appearing on the canvas.

My hope is that all the elements together will provide an invitation to your imagination that spark an interest that draws you in to the artwork, allowing your curiosity to take you on a path that will create a personal connection to the art.

David L Friend