David's
oil painting "lost" from 1973 recieves prize at Art Students League
New York, 1974.
"I grew up in an small apartment in Manhattan with no daylight whatsoever. The small rear windows directly faced the back of another building, so the curtains were always drawn. My folks were heavy smokers and my mom was seiously epilectic. I began drawing intensely at the age of seven, in a way, to generate my own windows on the world. My first job at 9 was stretching canvasses for a splashy acrylic painter friend who lived in our building. He would let me keep a really tiny canvass after each session and I could use his acrylics. After a few months of my hinting about oil painting, he disgruntingly presented me my first set of cheap chineese oil paints with the baiting remark; "go ahead, make a mess of it". So began my challenge of painting in oil. My earliest influences were painters like Rembrandt, Goya, Kandinsky, Dali, Tanguy. I remember being allowed to handle real Dali oil paintings at the Knoedler gallery during a show change and being totally overwhelmed by the lack of visible brush stokes. While I experimented with many styles and techniques, I was intrigued by themes of life and death - or better said, existence and being really - in both the arts and the real world. I felt that one of the most important things in life was to be authentic and take chances, so I went abstract, in spite of my very early art influences and friendly encouragements to "stay with what you know" -meaning my skills in figurative painting. By sixteen, I had met so many fascinating people in other fields, especially jazz musicians, philosophers and scientists, and eventually the abstract expressionists, who all undoubtably had a liberating effect on me. So much so, and because of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, I had to take a pause with my art. With seventeen I moved out of my folks place to a flophouse in Brooklyn. By 18, still penniless, I resumed painting again, and had become a master art supply theif. By the time I got to know Christopher Chambers and Jean-Michel Basquait 'round about 1979 - who I loved very much for their authenticity and freedom from any formal art training - I had already departed philosophically from any form of realism and painting anything from a preconcieved idea or sketch - and like with jazz - I learned to question and research, yet love the unpredictable and force the unknown. - DF
Second
solo exhibition in NYC, 1977. East River Savings Bank, 41 Rockefeller plaza.
First
solo exhibition, 1976, East River Savings Bank, 96st. Amsterdam ave. NYC.
Sample of works: Age 11 to 13.
Quill ink drawings 1973,
from a series af ca. 70 faces from 1972-1977. ca. 21 x 29 cm.
Pass it on, 1972, detail. Quill ink drawing, ca. 21 x 29 cm.
Entropy, 1975, oil on canvass, 61 x 51 cm.
Woman from neighborhood, 1975, oil on canvass, 61 x 51 cm.
Child, 1974, oil on canvass, 76 x 66 cm.
Dwelling, 1974, oil on canvass, 92 x 62 cm. (after a Henri Cartier Bresson
b&w photograph)
Flow, 1976, oil on canvass, 74 x 51 cm.
Note: the yelowish tint to the paintings are due to over 40 years of exposure to heavy a smoking environment in his parent's apartment.
Earliest works and exhibitions: 1970-1975 LINK
NYC Street Art & exhibitions: 1980 -1984 (aka AVANT)
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVANT & http://avant-streetart.com
Photo-paintings: 1990's LINK
Wikipedia Bio LINK