Description

Dan Cianfarini

Artist Statement

I began painting in watercolors over twenty years ago, in part to understand why I found myself increasingly attracted to watercolors over other media when visiting a museum or gallery. Having no formal studio art education, I began taking watercolor and drawing classes at the Arlington (MA) Center for the Arts and the Concord Art Association and in the intervening years have attended numerous painting workshops in the greater Boston area, Maine, California, Scotland, and Italy.

For over twelve years I’ve been working with watercolorist David Dewey in Owls Head, Maine. In addition, I’ve studied painting with Caleb Stone, Gary Tucker, Mary Whyte, David Taylor, Marjorie Glick, Emily Passman, Maris Platais, and Diane Fiedler, and life drawing with Helen Payne, Jeremy Angier, and Jason Polins. I’ve also participated in landscape painting workshops in Tuscany, studying with Maddine Insalaco and Joe Vinson of Etruscan Places. In most workshops emphasis has been on plein air practice as the best way to learn to capture light’s effects with quick, intuitive color choices and value contrasts.

I am temperamentally drawn to certain aspects of the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, specifically its focus on finding beauty in the natural cycle of growth and decay. I tend to paint old buildings, ruins, weathered boats, or other man-made objects whose worn surfaces suggest time’s passage. When painting a landscape, I often include an architectural element alluding to human presence and the notion of time.

DAN CIANFARINI.