* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Dana Oldfather was born in Berea, Ohio in 1978. She is a painter who has been in exhibitions in galleries and museums in Australia and the United States including Library Street Collective and The Butler Institute of American Art. She is proud to have been awarded the William and Dorothy Yeck Award for Young Painters and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Oldfather was twice featured in the New York Times, and published in the book The Art of Spray by Lori Zimmer of Art Nerd New York. Oldfather’s work was recently exhibited at Texas Contemporary, Miami Project, Art Palm Beach, and Art Palm Springs art fairs. Her paintings are internationally collected privately and can be found in many public and corporate collections in the US including the Pizzuti Collection with The Joseph Editions, Eaton Corporation, MGM International, The Cleveland Clinic, and the prestigious Progressive Art Collection.
Dana explains the work by saying, “These works celebrate paint while blurring the line between figurative and abstract. I use my camera roll for reference and images of family, friends, and movies drive the composition. Abstraction ameliorates semi-realistic underpainting giving recent memories new form. Figure, object and landscape, spin out and smear together as the paintings shudder with a pulsing, nervous energy. I use anxious, frenetic mark making to mirror a rushing world distorted by apprehension. The forces of obligation and yearning simultaneously charge and bind domestic environments. These paintings attest to the inherent emotional conflict of parenting young children, and the fragility of comfort and happiness in America today.”