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David Post Biography

It has been written that “David Post comes by his feeling for art naturally,” his father and mother being a painter and sculptor respectively (Sacramento Bee, Sunday, July 25, 1999). Although he began as “an abstract painter doing solidly resolved compositions with subtle and complex color relationships,” he later “began doing representational paintings that addressed new subject matter while retaining his concerns for strong color and composition.” As can be viewed on this website, his subject matter spans landscape, still-life, figure, and abstract compositions. His work is characterized by “painterly brushwork” and “complex color relationship’s” and “is marked by passages of suave delicacy.” His paintings are not confined to a predominate palette or color scheme. Thus, descriptions of individual paintings may vary substantially in tone.

For example,“the geometric complexities of the façade of a cream-colored building, making a composition that reads representationally but emphasizes the triangles, trapezoids and arched forms of the architecture, as well as an arching arcade of shrubbery in the foreground. Post plays off the dense, dark green of the shrubbery’s foliage against the creamy, almost fleshy tones of the building.”

In a lecture at the Crocker Art Museum some years back, Post observed that “heightened aesthetic experiences [reflected in his paintings] are a way to overcome the complexity of our existence. Because of this complexity, comprised of both our rich, intricate inner life of impressions and recollections and the ever-more complex modern outside world, we long for a simpler, and less overwhelming composition of impressions around us that acknowledges more soothingly and inferentially through its aesthetic relationships that intricacy.” Compositional elements are, hence, central to Post’s paintings, and are never overshadowed by the colors, brushwork, or subject matter of his works. Such an approach has enabled him to move from landscape to figure to abstract and still life without losing his aesthetic bearings and to claim each genre as his own. Therefore, in viewing Post’s works on this website and understand the aesthetic territory he strives to create it is important to keep in mind his willingness to sacrifice, at his discretion, perspective, dimension, color and/or reality in order to achieve his own, personal compositional viewpoint.