DAVID STEINDL

Bio

David Steindl is a visual artist from Portland, Maine, where the natural beauty of the region inspired generations of painters whose work became an early influence for him. David’s interest in literature and art history informs much of his paintings and the way they depict modern life.

After moving to New York to study painting at the School of Visual Arts, David developed a style borrowing elements from the disparate artistic and literary styles that inspire him, ranging from Existentialist literature to the Baroque. David currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Artist Statement

I combine techniques from both representational and color field painting to create figurative oil paintings of subjects ranging from flowers to disasters. In a broader sense, they are all unified in considering how to be happy in American society while being critical of it. But creating sociopolitical work is exhausting, and I found flowers to be a ripe subject for expressing a more sentimental side of my artistic sensibility. Flowers are often a symbol of unflinching beauty, but in my paintings, they adopt a more reserved stance by disappearing in and out of abstraction.

About work in this exhibition

As an artist, I find that I give myself an unusual amount of freedom to play with the paint when painting flowers. All of these pieces are painted from either direct observation or imagination, and I use this work to sort of “cleanse the air” from my more intense subject matter. Much of my painting delves into sociopolitical themes, but as that work developed, I realized that simultaneously making paintings of flowers helped focus my mind, develop my formal techniques, and add nuance to the emotional expression in my practice at large. For this reason, lowers appears in these paintings and the rest of my work as a metaphor for painting itself. Flowers are beautiful but seemingly purposeless, yet of course, they are essential for reproduction and growth; I that painting behaves similarly, both in my own life and culture at large.