David Onri Anderson "Life After Death"
“Any gardener knows how death works for life, any lover knows how life feels after death. With each fruit I eat, I get to an end, the core, the seed, and with much hope and little effort, the seed is planted for a future orchard. From the one discarded apple core can come an orchard full of apples. This process of seeming loss, little hope in the dark seed, is the energetic basis for my paintings of fruit in their various forms of energy and mystery. I had a diet that very much relied on fruit. While making paintings and eating fruit, I would be surrounded by apple cores, banana peels, bitten strawberries, clementine spiraled peels. After a while the lights would turn on inside my head and heart — the fruit energy and the fruit form became my muse. This fruit muse is always coming and going in my life, much like seasons of ripeness. It is not always apple season, but when it is, it is a bounty! Life: ripening, almost mature enough to be delicious and beautiful all at once. Ripe, at its prime, yet so close to being bad, overripe and mushy, Death. Death: the ripening is in the past, the skin is soft and defenseless, the flavor and texture beyond recognition, exposing a core, a hidden seed bundle, Life. Life: the seeds can be shat out, planted, forgotten and new life will find its way. The orchard can continue its cycle of existence.” - David Onri Anderson
"I try to have a daily practice, whether I have a show on the horizon or not. Every day I try to be in the studio. After a while, it’s like I have a record of my daily life and of my thoughts and experiences......I’m trying to build a vocabulary of images or things that I think are timeless - things that I think will always be a part of our reality and of our life."
"I know when a painting is done once it seems like something beyond what I intended or preconceived. Almost as if another hand had made it other than mine."
David Onri Anderson’s paintings are impressions of sensory and spiritual experiences with images. Anderson employs experimental, non-objective and intuitive approaches to process and materials, with influences from Jewish mysticism and tantric art to cosmic philosophy. Through the process of expanding, deconstructing and echoing of a variety of forms, he seeks out the inherent alchemical possibilities in colors, materials and repetition. His most recent subjects are fed from his practice as a gardener and nature lover in Tennessee, using patterns from organic life forms, extracting dyes and textures from elements such as leaves, flowers and fruit, and unfolding stories alluding to a universal spirit or mythology. He seeks to become more and more sustainable in his practice through the incorporation of reusing materials, foraging, and making his own tools and pigments from his garden and local surroundings in Nashville, TN.
Press release and images via Mepaintsme.
