What are we doing here? This classic existential predicament is at the heart of what informs David Linn's artwork, negotiating our precarious position as we stumble through life. Linn pursues two parallel veins of interest, one of a technically refined oil painter and draftsman, the other of a conceptual artist focusing on personal history.
"Throughout my life I have spent a great deal of time climbing mountains and wandering amid deserts and canyons, experiencing intense physical and spiritual sensations that have contributed much to the development of my visual vocabulary as an artist, as well as to my perception of who I am the process of physically wandering through the wilderness has a uniquely consistent effect upon the heart and mind. The experience of traversing terra incognita tends to purge the soul, to propel thoughts beyond the temporal world, and contributes to a form of perspective not easily obtainable through other means."
Varying greatly in size, Linn paints on curved panels that reveal a classic "sacred geometry" in their actual shape and composition. In his work, "Terrain #1 (the World)" (2002), a series of rocks come together at a strange fissure in the center of the painting. Strongly textured areas of the surface pick up glints of light, while the silk-like smoothness of the sky heightens a sense of vast and open spaces, a natural world full of wonder that still dwarfs the understanding or ambitions of human beings. Some work is figurative, such as "The Beginning of the Creation" (2002), though the identity of the figure is left literally in shadow, his head ringed by a halo of light. His most recent charcoal drawings, embedded in layers of resin, display the same luminosity and metaphysics of the oil paintings - recent large pieces like "Divest" and "The Expectation" being good examples.
Linn chooses a spectrum of earth tones, evocative for many of the sepia colors in 19th century photographs. "I often see without color," comments the artist, "I make sense of my world through concepts, ideas given form, relationships between object and environment. But in my personal aesthetic, color is a veneer existing only on the surface of things. Color has potential power, but its use would cloud my perception and confuse my aim. Color carries vast and sometimes unwanted psychological import, and attaching that to the images I create would yield confusion."
Each delicately crafted painting seems to be easily understood. The viewer can admire the awe-inspiring draftsmanship, shading and highly refined brushwork, especially in the delicate rendering of stone and cloth. Each is intended to potentially function as a sacred relic. "My work is spiritual in nature, and while precepts of 'doctrine' may be extrapolated from the images I create, what drives and vivifies the image for me is something more indefinable, something which derives from my core, from a place where neither words nor images exist."
For the jewel-like quality and luminosity of their surfaces, Linn's paintings have been compared to many great Dutch and Flemish masters, such as Johannes Vermeer and French artist Georges La Tour. Linn admires the potent humanism of the Baroque masters and the way classic Surrealists made the "irrational seem plausible."
Newer paintings such as the huge "The Crossing" (2004) and "The Terrain of Decision" (2004) incorporate small niches into the backs of a four inch thick panel. These pieces combine Linn's two avenues of investigation, the highly detailed "sacred" paintings and the conceptual or minimalist use of objects. Meant to hang in the center of the room, "The Terrain of Decision" holds a jar containing the ashes of the burned journals of Linn's ancestors. Within this jar is suspended a single gold ingot.
Recent work in other media include a series of walking sticks that are charred, armored or otherwise adorned with swirling frozen cloth, called "For Your Journey." His time-lapsed three channel video "Sublimation" debuted as part of "Gathering Light" in our gallery in the fall of 2006.
Linn's artwork has shown at the Nicolaysen Museum, The Spartanburg County Museum of Art, the Springville Museum of Art, the Sangre de Cristo Art Center, the BYU Museum of Art, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Arnot Art Museum and the Communications Arts Center in Palo Alto, among others. His work has been discussed on National Public Radio and reviewed in ARTnews, The New York Times, the Salt Lake Tribune, and numerous other publications, as well as appearing in New American Paintings in 2000. He is an Artist-in-Permanence at Frey Norris Gallery. Monotypes, charcoal drawings, paintings, conceptual pieces and site-specific commissions are available through the gallery.
