* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Dan Webb is an artist living in Seattle, WA who earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree, Magna Cum Laude, from the Cornish College of the Arts.
Dan explains his work by saying, “What I try to do as an artist is to simply make the stuff I would most like to see. That means getting out of the way of what a lot of other people are doing, because by default, if they were already making what I wanted to see, then I wouldn’t have to. If you see what I mean. That sounds simple enough. But the reality is that choosing a less trodden path means bumping into some mathematical reality: there are an incredible amount of artists making an incredible amount of stuff. The statistical likelihood of doing something without a whole lot of precedent just doesn’t seem probable. And really, by making carvings like I do, I’m very consciously acquiescing to that fact. I’m doing something that has more historical precedent than any other human artistic activity- probably by a longshot. That alone would seem to contradict the whole idea of getting out of the way of most other artists. But the crazy irony is that carving puts me on the opposite pole of almost everything else in contemporary art. I’m an outlier in the wilderness. That’s because, incredibly, most artists have signed on to just a few starting points for their work that are nearly universal, and these starting points are either undermined or rejected by carving.”
