David Campbell (born March 31, 1936) is an American realist painter, poet, and faculty member at the Maine College of Art. Many of his oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings feature urban and industrial scenes rendered meticulously over the course of months and even years of plein-air sessions, deftly imbuing quotidian subjects with abstract significance. A large portion of Campbell's work captures the vibrancy and intricacy of urban and suburban vistas, especially around his former residence in Somerville, Massachusetts.[1]
Critical evaluations of his work are as varied as his subjects, which range from fallow fields, to crowded streets and industrial parks framed by piles of scrap metal and junk. While one reviewer noted a recurring "theme of desolation, which when coupled with the subject matter can also be understood as comment on America's ever diminishing industrial base and the lives it once sustained," others have found wellsprings of different emotions. Referring to Campbell's 1980's work "Reading", in which "a woman sits on her claustrophobic back porch, closed in by household junk on either side...the neighborhood houses are close behind, and an ugly apartment building blocks the sky," art critic Linda Bamber nonetheless finds that the woman's "posture speaks of her complete absorption in the book on her lap...The smoke from the woman's cigarette could be her spirit ascending, completely unconstrained by all the enclosures."[4]
Often returning to the same location throughout the year to capture seasonal changes, Campbell insists on rendering all his works through plein-air sessions. "Some people work from photographs," Campbell explained in an interview for the Boston Review,
"and that's fine; but for my part I'd rather bag groceries in the supermarket than do that. For me the whole part of it is to make contact with my surroundings. I want to get to a caring level about where I am. How can you do that with a photograph? It's more than just the visual act. You have to immerse yourself in the scene."[4]
This attention to detail and place is what gives Campbell's paintings "scientific, cerebral, and spiritual" significance, as author Michael Kammen wrote in his book A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture.[5] Campbell described his work Summer (1987), which depicts a rolling field in North Andover, MA, in an interview with the author:
"Because I see nature as the basis of life, it is sacred to me...The fact that I live in a city makes me feel especially exhilarated when I visit this field. The look of things is so thoroughly different through the seasons that my industrial home neighborhood is changeless by comparison. Important cycles other than the cycle of the seasons are recorded in the series."[6]
Complex and dominating cloudscapes also feature prominently in Campbell's work, often occupying two-thirds or more of the canvas. One review in the artsMEDIA section of the Boston Globe found that his "heavy, colorless skys, which foretell an impending doom" appeared to be "angry; and they seem ready to burst with a fury powerful enough to mercifully finish off the slow destruction taking place below."[7]
Recently, Campbell has found inspiration in maritime scenes around his home in Portland, Maine prompting him to paint a series of oil tankers to fill out his corpus of industrial and cityscapes. "I've always been attracted to complexity in whatever subject I am painting," Campbell explained in an interview for the Maine Sunday Telegram, "And let's face it, there's a lot of complexity in these tankers. There are a lot of elements, and a lot of things going on."[8] His paintings of these behemoth ships have appeared in an exhibition at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, titled "Some Burdensome: Big Ships, Big Cargoes," and are scheduled to appear in a new exhibition at the Portland Public Library in August 2013.
In 1993, the Somerville-based Home First organization recognized Campbell at its "Somerville Pride Night," the first artist to be granted the distinction.[9] Indeed, the prominence of Somerville throughout Campbell's paintings has led art critic Nancy Curtis to comment that "David Campbell has done for Somerville what Vermeer did for Delft," a reference to the 17th century Dutch painter whose work immortalized the middle-class lifestyle of his city.[10]
Campbell's work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the United States and internationally. His solo exhibitions include appearances at the Galleria III in Florence, Italy, Boston City Hall, and Babson College.
Poetry by Campbell has appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Dan River Anthology, "Goose River Anthology," Sensations Magazine, and Struggle Magazine. "Looking at Trees," an essay by the artist, appeared in the November, 1982 issue of The Sun.[2]
Notes and sources
↑ Gerold Wunderlich & Company, David Campbell, introduction by Josiah Lee Auspitz, (New York: Gerold Wunderlich & Co., 1990), p. 5.
↑ Pat Davidson Reef, "Frost Gully is Serious about good art," Sun Journal (Lewiston, MA), November 13, 1998, p. 12.
1 2 Linda Bamber, "Made in Somerville," Boston Review, Dec. 1986, p. 15.
↑ Michael Kammen, A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 244.
↑ Michael Kammen, A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 244-245.
↑ Adam Lambert, "Streets and Roads," Boston Globe, artsMEDIA section, May 1997, p. 23.
↑ Bob Keyes, "Size Matters," Maine Sunday Telegram, March 14, 2010, D1-2.
↑ "Somerville painter first 'Home First' honoree," The Somerville Journal, Oct. 1993, p. 1.
↑ Nancy Curtis, "Six From Around Town," Boston Observer, August 1983, p. 4.
John Walker is an English painter and printmaker. He has been called "one of the standout abstract painters of the last 50 years."
James Browning Wyeth is an American realist painter, son of Andrew Wyeth, and grandson of N.C. Wyeth. He was raised in Chadds Ford Township, Pennsylvania, and is artistic heir to the Brandywine School tradition — painters who worked in the rural Brandywine River area of Delaware and Pennsylvania, portraying its people, animals, and landscape.
Frank Weston Benson, frequently referred to as Frank W. Benson, was an American artist from Salem, Massachusetts known for his Realistic portraits, American Impressionist paintings, watercolors and etchings. He began his career painting portraits of distinguished families and murals for the Library of Congress. Some of his best known paintings depict his daughters outdoors at Benson's summer home, Wooster Farm, on the island of North Haven, Maine. He also produced numerous oil, wash and watercolor paintings and etchings of wildfowl and landscapes.
Alex Katz is an American figurative artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints.
John Joseph Enneking was an American Impressionist painter associated with the Boston School.
Neil Gavin Welliver was an American-born modern artist, best known for his large-scale landscape paintings inspired by the deep woods near his home in Maine. One of his sons, Titus Welliver, later became a successful actor.
Charles Codman was an American painter. A native of Portland, Maine, he was known for his landscape and marine paintings.
Will Barnet was an American artist known for his paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints depicting the human figure and animals, both in casual scenes of daily life and in transcendent dreamlike worlds.
Rackstraw Downes is a British-born realist painter and author. His oil paintings are notable for their meticulous detail accumulated during months of plein-air sessions, depictions of industry and the environment, and elongated compositions with complex perspective.
David Hilliard is an American photographer. A fine arts photographer who works mainly with panoramic photographs, he draws inspiration from his personal life and those around him for his subject matter. Many of the scenes are staged, evoking a performative quality, a middle ground between fact and fiction.
Donald Hugo "Don" Stoltenberg was an American painter specializing in marine subjects.
Stephen Morgan Etnier was an American realist painter, painting for six decades. His work is distinguished by a mixture of realism and luminism, favoring industrial and working scenes, but always imbued with atmospheric light. Geographically, his career spanned the length of the eastern Atlantic and beyond.
Robert Gwathmey was an American social realist painter. His wife was photographer Rosalie Gwathmey(September 15, 1908 – February 12, 2001) and his son was architect Charles Gwathmey.
Paul Hampden Dougherty was an American marine painter. Dougherty was recognized for his American Impressionism paintings of the coasts of Maine and Cornwall in the years after the turn of the 20th century. His work has been described as bold and masculine, and he was best known for his many paintings of breakers crashing against rocky coasts and mountain landscapes. Dougherty also painted still lifes, created prints and sculpted.
T. Allen Lawson is an American artist recognized for his landscape paintings of Wyoming and Maine subjects, and is perhaps best known for having painted the White House Christmas card in 2008. His work is characterized by patient observation of nature and an interest in abstract design. He is a resident of Rockport, Maine.
Thomas Browne Cornell was an American artist.
Harold Garde was an American abstract expressionist painter and the originator and namer of the Strappo technique.
Robert Beck is an American painter and writer. He is best known for his plein air paintings of scenes in and around Bucks County, Pennsylvania ; Jonesport, Maine; and New York City, typically in multiple-painting series.
Jon Imber (1950–2014) was an American artist.
Eliot O'Hara was an American artist and educator known for his masterful watercolors, especially his impressionistic landscapes. The Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine has over 120 of his watercolors representing all aspects of his work. His paintings are in the collections of many museums in the USA and have been the subject of exhibitions throughout the United States. He was an influential educator through his nearly 40 years of teaching, writing, and film making.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
