Art Resources Gallery


	Dana Carlson

Abstract ~ Landscape ~ Figurative ~ Floral ~ Glass ~ Textile ~ Sculpture

“I am grateful to dwell daily in the world of creativity. My creative day is filled with reading, writing, observing, postulating, tinkering, constructing, designing, drawing and painting. Within painting, the concepts of time and simplicity are two of my main interests and inspirations. Today, they are represented in my work in “the Cricket Tree Series”, “the Beach Series”, and “the Façade Series”. These ideas make me feel the contentment and solitude of simper, happier times. Once the image is chosen, I tend to concentrate and tinker with the color, texture, and from with “chance” being the important ingredient. It's far more exciting not to know exactly where I'm going with it all and in the end, discover the finished artwork.

My youth and adolescence were a great time. It was free from want, fear, and serious obligations. I was lucky. I spent many days-weeks-months visiting and working on my uncle's farm just outside my hometown. I was blessed with such an experience. My uncle's farm was a traditional single family farm. It had wide open spaces and big “ole” cottonwood trees… their canopies swaying in the wind in the hollows. I spent my days there gathering eggs, milking cows, slopping the pigs, and combining wheat and corn. The hot summer days and cold quiet winter nights continued on and on leaving me with good memories of days gone by.

The “Cricket Tree Series” is my representation of all those memories. In the evening, this tree would bellow with the sound of crickets as the sun was setting. For the reason, this particular tree was there home. I'd sit down on the porch stoop, relaxing, as I watched the sky dim from dark blue to black. All the while, the cricket tree kept calling out. It was a great summer sound.

Now as I visit there from time to time, that same tree still resonates with the crickets' call reminding me of those simpler times and how nice memories can be”

Ah, the ocean… that flat horizon line that I, a plainsman, can identity with!

Again, being familiar and comfortable with the simple notion that a “horizon line” is “time demonstrated” and for whatever reason “time” is intimate to me.

Also, the beach series, in depicting “us” at ease, is just a pleasing image. It seems a natural place to be drawn to… a simpler time.

In some ways, this series is a metaphor for my “belief and concern” of what we (our culture) is leaving behind.

I walk these small towns and neighborhoods feeling the intimacy of a “smaller human scale” of things than what we tend to experience in our contemporary times…. Examples might be: 1.) a small individual apartment above a ma and pa store, not a high-rise of a hundred units. 2.) A town and not a sprawling city of one suburb bumping into another. 3.) The facade begs the question to me of “how much sprawl and population growth can we keep on tolerating? Is there not great volume in large open spaces? 4.) Aesthetically, the façade is pleasing unto itself, especially at night or dusk when the shapes and textures are muted and softened in dinner light. 5.) I personally just “feel” more comfortable in this “smaller” human scale of things!