David FeBland: Stories Red and Blue

Road Trip, Oil on canvas, 54 x 34 

David FeBland’s work considers issues of privacy, conflict and isolation in contemporary urban life, employing a colorist’s eye and a strong sense of formal compositional structure. He describes the interaction between man and our physical universe through a series of invented truths, a sleight of the facts as it were, inspired by observations. His paintings, drawing upon experiences over a wide range of geographical locations, are driven by a conviction that certain behavioral responses to ones environment are universal.

Critic Brett McCabe described his paintings as such: “These images are disarmingly involving. His ability to instill strongly emotive elements into his work also hints at the more graphic work of Ben Shahn and Diego Rivera. It suggests an evolution of socially conscious realism that both Ashcan artists and Shahn flirted with, a very modern response to the Soviet socialist movement that embraces its more expressive elements…. {this is} a quality that gives the movies of Spike Lee their poignancy, and it’s a spirit that FeBland’s works achieve better than his contemporaries.”

In FeBland’s words, “I’m not particularly interested in making references to popular culture in my work because so much of what we commonly associate with that culture is itself distilled through some medium, originally television but now so many other forms of social media, rather than from direct observation. By creating paintings that derive from my own experience, I become the medium rather than a response to it.”.

This is David FeBland's first show at Susan Calloway Fine Arts. 

Where:
Susan Calloway Fine Arts
1643 Wisconsin Ave NW
Washington DC, 20007

When:
On view: March 23 - April 21, 2018
Reception: March 23: 6 – 8pm

Artist Talk: March 24: 3 – 4pm