ABOUT ME
DAVID VANO
ARTIST
BASED IN ALASKA
David Vano was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley (South Texas). After high school, he went to Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State) and obtained a B.A. in English and History, along with a teaching certification. After his undergraduate work, he finished an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the same university. Currently he lives in Anchorage with his wife, Rebecca, (who grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska) and son, Benjamin. David teaches IB Literature at West Anchorage High School. He currently has work displayed in Anchorage, Alaska at the Stephan Fine Arts Gallery. He considers his painting influences to be Paul Cezanne, J.M.W. Turner, Matisse, early Mondrian and his poetic influences Ovid, Wallace Stevens, Ranier Maria Rilke, and Yannis Ritsos.
WHY I PAINT
I paint to feel a sense of the sacred, to realize the sublime, to represent spirit as ultimately a tactile experience. I think this is why I love painting landscapes, particularly wilderness or expansive ground. Being from South Texas, I never thought I would be exploring the Alaskan wilderness through painting and wandering and fishing and hunting. Twenty-three years ago, before I became a teacher, I drove a supply van up and down the Dalton Highway for Northern Alaska Tour Company. On some days I drove hundreds of miles north of Fairbanks, dropping off adventurers along the way or resupplying Coldfoot Camp or even escorting folks all the way to Deadhorse so that they could dip a toe in the Arctic Ocean. I was spellbound by the tundra landscape beyond Atigun Pass. The land is vast, so vast, with wildlife abundant, and a stillness and color and scenery so pure and annihilating. I now feel compelled to create a mythology of landscape, not just of Alaskan landscape, but a landscape of the imagination. Now, for me, painting makes wilderness experience tangible. Painting, which at every opportunity is a new excursion of color and composition and imaginative activity, propagates that feral sense of solitude heightened by wilderness.
The abstract is the bone of the spirit; abstract art moves sharply toward the root of the thing made. When viewing an abstract painting (especially abstract landscape), the spectator can no longer stand idle, no, it is essential that the spectator participate, just as it is essential for a reader to participate with a good poem or a good book.
This is why I paint: to be connected with the divine sense and to deliver that experience or sensation onto the canvas.