About Me

I have returned to oil painting after a 30-year hiatus, concentrating on storytelling and the expression of the psyche through portraiture and rendering of the human form. I imagine my subjects' back-stories consisting of very specific self-narratives, thoughts, and feelings. If the viewer can connect to those imagined back-stories or independently connect to their own imaginations, then my work succeeds.

The great figurative expressionists of the early 20th century and their progeny inspire and guide me. Not just their painting styles, but their focus on themes drawn from modern political, social, and religious upheavals and their dehumanizing impact on the subjective, angst-ridden individual. My own life-story, family history, and inherited multi-generational dislocation and trauma help convey those universal themes, but only because that is my particular language and vehicle of expression. I find beauty in a variety of subjects, including the deflated middle manager in the post-industrial economy, the repressed exploring their own sexuality, the immigrant, the marginalized and passed-over, the psychologically stunted, and the Jewish experience across space and time.

Nothing satisfies me more than using the instrumentality of a work of art to create an unspoken emotional and psychological connection among artist, subject matter, and audience.

David Seligman