Daniel Sprick

Born: May 1, 1953, Little Rock, Arkansas Education: AA-Mesa College, Grand Junction, CO; 1973Ramon Froman School of ArtNational Academy of Design, New York, NY 1976BA-University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO 1978 Residence: Dan lives in Glenwood Springs, Colorado with his wife, Andrea and daughter Elena Selected Public CollectionsArkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, Arkansas Denver Art Museum, Denver, ColoradoThe Evansville Museum of Art and Science, Evansville, INNational Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DCThe Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TNState of Colorado, State Capitol Building, Denver, COThe Denver Post, Denver, COHolmes, Robert and Owens, Denver, COMontgomery, Little, Young, Campbell and McGrew, PC., Englewood, CONorth American Equities, Denver, COU.S. West Communications, Denver, CO United States Court of Appeals, Byron White Courthouse, Denver, COWilliams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA Selected Solo Exhibitions2003 Mariani Gallery University of Northern Colorado - Greeley, CO 2002 Evansville Museum of Art & Science, Evansville, IN 2001 Merrill-Johnson Gallery of Fine Art, Denver, CO 1999 Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO (brochure) 1998 The Merrill Gallery, Denver, CO (catalogue) 1996 Barney Wycoff Gallery, Aspen, CO 1995 The Gerald Wunderlich Gallery, New York, NY 1994 Carol Siple Gallery, Denver, CO 1993 Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN 1992 Louis Newman Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA 1991 Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO 1990 Bishop Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ (drawings) 1990 Glenwood Springs Center for the Arts, Glenwood Springs, CO 1989 Sherry French Gallery, New York, NY (catalogue) 1989 Mariani Gallery University of Northern Colorado - Greeley, CO 1987 “Contemporary Realism-Exhibition of Drawings and Paintings,”Clara Hatton Gallery, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO and The Art Center at Appalshop, Inc., Whitesburg, KY (catalogue) 1980 Capricorn Gallery, Bethesda, MD 1978 Students Center Gallery, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO Selected Group Exhibitions2003 "Fifth Annual Realism Invitational" Jenkins Johnson Gallery - San Francisco, CA 2003 Salon d'Arts, Colorado History Museum, Denver, CO 2003 Foothills Art Center's 35th Anniversary Exhibition 2003 "Magic Realism" Sangre De Cristo Center for the Arts 2002-2003 San Fancisco International Art Exposition 2001 The Art of Illusion, LA County Fair, Millard Sheets Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (catalogue) 2001 Representing Representation, The Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY (catalogue) 2000-01 Group Exhibition, John Pence Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2000 Realism Today, Taos Art Museum, Taos, NM 1999-02 Realism Invitational, Jenkins-Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, DA 1999 John Pence Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Drawing Exhibition (catalogue) 1999 Trompe’oeil, Art & Illusion John Pence Gallery, San Francisco, CA (catalogue) 1996 Realism ’96, Fletcher Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 1994 Contemporary Realism, Gerold Wunderlich & Co., New York, NY (brochure) 1994 Arvada Center for the Arts, Arvada, CO 1993-99 Governor’s Invitational, Loveland, CO 1993 Contemporary Realists, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO 1993 Contemporary Self Portraits from the James Goode Collection, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 1993 Still Life: 1963-1993, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 1991-92 American Still Life Paintings, Minnesota Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN 1992 Two person exhibition: Daniel Sprick and Mark Daily, Carol Siple Gallery, Denver, CO (catalogue) 1990 Colorado 1990, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO 1989-90 Love and Charity: The Tradition of Caritas in Contemporary Painting, Sherry French Gallery, New York, NY; traveled to Dowd Fine Arts Gallery, SUNY Cortland, Cortland, NY; The Noyes Museum, Oceanville, NJ; Roland Gibson Gallery; SUNY Potsdam, Potsdam, NY. 1989-90 Trains and Planes” The Influence of Locomotion in American Painting, Sherry French Gallery , New York, NY; traveled to Arts in the Academy, The National Academy of Sciences., Washington, DC; Roberson Museum Science Center, Binghamton, NY: Evansville Museum of Arts & Science, Evansville, IN 1989 Colorado Artists at the Kennedy Center, Washington, DC 1989 The Food Show, Grand Central Art Galleries, New York, NYRevelation and Devotion: The Spirit of Religion in contemporary Art, Sherry French Gallery, New York, NY: traveled to Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA; Art Gallery at Gustavas Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN; Valparaiso University Museum of Art, Valparaiso, IN; Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY 1988 Collector’s Show, The Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR 1987-2000 Artists of America, Colorado History Museum, Denver, CO 1987-88 Contemporary Realism, Grand Central Art Galleries, New YorkArt for the Parks, National Park Academy of the Arts, Jackson Hole, WY; traveled to Smithsonian Institution, Great Hall, Washington, DC. 1987-89 The Tradition of Vanitas in Contemporary Painting, Sherry French Gallery, New York, NY; traveled to Silvermine Guild of Artists, New Canaan, Ct; The Noyes Museum, Oceanville, NJ; University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ; University of Utah Museum of Art, Salt Lake City, UT; Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA: Schick Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Tyler Art Gallery, SUNY Oswego, Oswego, NY. 1986 Art USA, Western Colorado Center for the Fine Arts, Grand Junction, CO 1985 American Artists National Competition, Grand Central Art Galleries, New York, NYArtists of the West, Pioneers’ Museum Show, Colorado Springs, CO (catalogue) 1984 Gallery Group Show, Carson-Siple Gallery, Denver, CO 1982 Colorado Oil Painting, Foothills Fie Arts Center, Golden, COAnnual Exhibition 69,70, Allied Artists of American, Inc. National Arts Club, New York, NY. Allied Artists of America Gold Medal recipient Selected BibliographyMcConnellogue, Kieran, “Portrait of the Artist as a Craftsman,” University of Northern Colorado, Spectrum Magazine, December, 2001Daley Ann Scarlett , “Like Flying,” The American Spectator, May 2001.Spears, Dorothy, “A Still Life,” American Artist, April 2001Gangleholf, Bonnie, “The Nature of Beauty,” Southwest Art, May 1999Rosen, Steven, “Artistry: Paintings Ring of Surrealism,” Denver Post, March 31, 1994Hill, Hart, “Real Still Life,” Westward, March 23-29, 1994Coronel, Michael and Patricia, “Daniel Sprick: Reflective Realism,” Art Space, November-December 1989Pontello, Jacqueline, “Daniel Sprick,” Southwest Art, May 1987Eicher-Dixon, Peter, “Daniel Sprick,”American Artist, August, 1987Douslin, P.A., “Daniel Sprick,” Art Gallery International, November-December, 1986. Essay by Jane FudgeSolo Exhibition Brochure at Vance Kirkland Close Range Gallery, The Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO All that we see or seemIs but a dream within a dream.Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49)“A Dream within a Dream”-It is a view both familiar and strange.Here are the homely commonplaces of after-school snacks and the canned raw material of home cooking. Here are remnants of dinner out, those little trapezoidal cardboard boxesthat entomb Chinese leftovers. They are the same kind of boxes in which dime stores once sold doomed goldfish to hopeful children. Here is the detritus of the studio, jars ofgessso and flyspecked still lifes. Here are spent wine bottles, beer bottles, a Ukrainian Easter egg, the used up milk cartons that in reality bear a plaintive entreaty: Have you seen me? Empty, empty, yet full of meaning. Revealed by a tarnished-silver light are loveingly neglected, straggly indoor plants and slightly dusty fruit. Gorgeous flowers sip from impossibly delicate vessels and sometimes hover, imperishable, in midair.Enter stranger, the world painted by Daniel Sprick. An inheritor of pictorial tradition that goes back at least as far as ancient Rome and later compelled the best efforts of such Northern European masters as Roger van de Weyden and Jan Vermeer, Sprick finds much yet to be revealed in the still life and the interior. His ultra realistic oil paintings continue and expand old dialogues about appearance and reality, the relationship of art and life, the revelation of the multiples in the simple. Although he is a man who is devoted to the meticulous representation of everyday things, Daniel Sprick’s career as a painter began with visions of flight.“I began drawing,” Daniel Sprick explains, “at age four. Dad showed me how.” Airplanes were a passion. The youngster associated their graceful contours with movement and eventually made elegance in drawing the equivalent of flight. Balsa wood gliders, looping and banking, focused Sprick’s imagination on the beauty of line. To this day, Sprick relates an “exquisite line” to being airborne. Each painting, he says, is his search for “just the right launch,” and exercise that must conclude in a perfect landing. Today he is both a widely recognized artist and an experience pilot. His exhilaration in flight informs such affectionate bits of iconography as the DC-3 (buzzing Leonardo da Vinci’s canon of human proportion) on the side of a milk carton, and the precarious feats of levitation performed by knives, eggs, and other unlikely objects in Flora Spirited and other works.Tensions between interior and exterior, tradition and experiment, distance and intimacy, charm and weirdness, and literal representation and emotional expression fill Daniel Sprick’s paintings. Viewed through this works, the artist’s world is a small one—studio, hallway, a studio table, a window—yet it encompasses a kind of cosmic vision. “I didn’t know you could be a professional artist until I was in my mid-twenties,” Sprick recalls. “I thought it was too late for me.”Nevertheless, Sprick began with an energetic examination of historical painting styles. He studied with Ramon Froman, a flower of John Singer Sargent, who introduced him to Sargent’s slashing, illusionistic technique. By the mid-1970’s Daniel Sprick began serious work as a plein-air impressionist in New Mexico. A lifelong love of drawing and native technical mastery of paint led him in retrograde fashion to Hon Ruskin-like close observation of nature in 1980. He started with a series of botanical subjects. However the great tradition of figure painting was something about which Sprick felt ambivalent. “Transitory things are hard,” he observes, “and portraits and figures can be a pain.” (His inspiration, John Singer Sargent, would agree.) Since he paints relatively slowly, Sprick concludes that asking a living model to pose” eight hours at a stretch day after day” is not practical.Although Sprick shies from discussing a codified iconography for his paintings, he is indebted to earlier masters. The painters of the Northern Renaissance, Robert Campin (the Master of Flémalle), Roger van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, the van Eyck brothers- Jan and/or Hubert- “leave me feeling both helpless and empowered,” Sprick says. So does Giovanni Bellini’s almost hallucinatory style. The archaic and modern qualities that seem to converge so effortlessly in the works of these early painters continue to fascinate Sprick. He admires the ability for these artists to create a believable look at invisible realms and supernatural happenings. For example, the miracle depicted in Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with the Chancellor Rolin (1433-34) occurs in a luxurious room but is ignored by two passer-bys seen through the balcony window. Such tangible yet elusive apparitions live on in secular form in Sprick’s vision of a hovering egg in Flora Spirited, or in the artists’ own shadowy personal appearance reflected in a mirror in All We See or Seem.Sprick paints with intensity and even joy. He keeps an eye out for signs of transcendence in the everyday, yet he has a completely contemporary sense of irony that is illustrated by the following parallel. The Master of Flémalle and Roger van der Weyden furnished their imaginary (but convincingly painted) interiors with the same props again and again. A certain kind of bulbous, blue-figured import ceramic made a regular appearance in both artists’ works, usually as a flower pot for the Virgin’s symbolic lily. Daniel Sprick updates this familiar motif with prosaic but no less beautifully decorated milk cartons. In Dusk and Vapor, one milk carton label reads, “Vapor Calcium Fortified,” while another proclaims, “The Dusk Fat Free Milk, “ Daniel Sprick enjoys these near-surreal enigmas and plants them frequently for viewers to find , a kind of hide-the-thimble game folded into his beautifully realized works. In Calcium, another carton is embellished with the androgynous creamer of Edvard Munch and stuffed with partly disarticulated human bones. Despite its macabre overtones, Calcium could well illustrate Walt Whitman:My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,I laugh at what you call dissolution,And I know the amplitude of time.(Song of Myself, 2)Another source for Sprick is Jan Vermeer, the Dutch baroque painter of intimate domestic interiors. In Vermeer’s inhabited, yet extremely quiet, rooms and corners, magic comes from an earthly, not supernatural light. Yet magic it is. A Vermeer-like glow infuses many of Daniel Sprick’s paintings, often falling on objects from some unseen source. It spreads arbitrarily through his interiors, picking out this tangerine and that bottle, causing their color and form to bloom, submerging other parts of the painting in warm shadow. From Vermeer too, comes the suggestion of worlds within worlds. Oriental rugs imply distant exotic places (and perhaps Sprick’s obsession with flying via magic carpet as well). Paintings and fine art prints tacked to walls, tantalizing reflections in a blank television screen, figures half-seen through distant doorways enhance the notion of time and distance. Daniel Sprick also revisits the tradition of the still life as memento mori. Yet again, in these contemporary works, the traditional images of decay and dissolution –faded flowers, broken china, eggshells, a human skull---are leavened with humorous elements such as nibbled cookies and a seeping stain that spreads from a paper bag to the book it stands on. For all his devotion to the realist tradition in painting, Daniel Sprick’s views are entirely contemporary, and he emphasizes the abstract underpinnings of his and others’ work. “All art is abstract, of course. The art is to extract the parts of reality we can use and leave the rest.” While the content of his paintings reaches for transcendence, Sprick is pragmatic when he describes his works’ formal properties, and the preparation he makes for each one. He is not enamored of laborious painting techniques. The smoothly pained, jewel-like surfaces of Daniel Sprick’s images belie the simple, shortcut methods he sues. He paints on masonite primed with gesso. For smaller works, Sprick makes a charcoal sketch directly on the support before beginning to work; larger paintings demand separate studies and preliminary drawings.“Painters who go in for verisimilitude need to start with things that cooperate,” he says with a smile, explaining why he rarely paints anything in motion. And he makes light of his choice of still-life material: “I’m fundamentally lazy. I don’t have to look very far for things to paint. I like the shapes of milk cartons because they look like architecture, diminutive houses. And I enjoy inventing the calligraphy. In that way, I guess I’ve been influenced by Pop Art- though I really don’t have much sympathy for it!”This is another example of the equilibrium of an artist who rarely paints people, yet who admired and learned from both the flamboyant portraiture of Nicolai Fechin and the restrained and detailed works of Han Holbein. “Much of my drawing experience comes from portraits,” Daniel Sprick says, “and painting is really nothing but drawing.” A note of pride rises in his voice then fades. “I should do more drawing.” He remarks softly.---- Jane FudgeJane Fudge is assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum, and a visual art and film critic.This Exhibition was organized by Dianne Perry Vanderlip, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum. 1987 The Vanitas Theme in American Still Life Painting, Sherry French Gallery, NY