ARTIST STATEMENT

I have pursued painting practically all of my life. When I was young I had other explanations for painting, mostly borrowed from other artists. The decisions I make during the process of painting are mainly instinctive and have evolved over a period of years. I still think art is a hard thing to define; it defies any kind of real logic, especially when you compare painting to other professions. It remains an unanswered question for me. Now, at 66 years of age my work has become my iden­tity: it represents who I am.

These images that I paint are a fragment of the visions that I started out with as a boy. Still, they are a chronology of those original visions, influenced over time and altered by N.C. Wyeth, Picasso, Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, Larry rivers, Jackson Pollack, Willem DeKooning, Franz Kline, Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Olivera, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Odd Nerdrum, Van Gogh, most of the impressionists and post imp­ress­ionists, Goya, Velasquez, Titian, Michael­angelo, Turner, the poetry of Blake and Milton, Roman Catholicism, the Irish poets and writers, my father and uncle, 20 years in San Francisco a year in South America, 60s music, alcohol and Billy Holiday.

BIOGRAPHY

Dan Boylan was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1940. He attended the University of Nebraska at Omaha and finished his education in art after moving to California in 1961. He returned to Omaha in 1984 to paint full time and shows his work in galleries around the Midwest. His work is locally seen at the Dundee Gallery and Bemis Center in Omaha. He is also represented by Vivian Kiechel, a fine art dealer.

Dan's exploration of painting takes him through the worlds of nature: the Midwestern landscape, the city scene and ultimately to the subject of the human figure. He has had one man shows from the Joslyn Art Museum in 1989 to the Preston Contemporary Art Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 2008. His work is in private and cor­porate collections from ConAgra Foods to Senator Ben Nelson in Washington, DC.