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Daniel Mundy
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Tomales Bay View
14" x 18" oil
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Daniel Mundy, a full time artist, has painted
and exhibited in the Sacramento region for many years and currently has a
studio in Rocklin, CA.
Daniel started painting over 35 years
ago. “Along the way, I chased a lot of rabbits” he says. “But I kept coming
back to the brushes. Now I’m on my last trick. There’s nothing left to do but
paint.” And paint he does.
Daniel’s work has a clarity of color and light
that often gives the viewer the feeling that one could almost walk into his
paintings. Some of his works have a “found object” quality to them while
others have a more classic, timeless sensibility. He uses brush work and some
broken color to achieve a richness in paint that brings the viewer into the
environments he creates on canvas.
Daniel is largely self-taught. There were
artistic influences in his life but he never studied extensively with anyone
that worked in oil, the medium he’s always painted with. What he has
accomplished has come to him through miles and miles of canvas.
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Tomales Bay Eucalyptus
18" x 24" oil
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“When you start out as a budding artist, your
first goal is just learning to paint. Then it may take you some time to decide
what to paint. Next you might think a lot about why you paint. And finally,
you can spend the rest of your life chasing how you’re going to paint.”
“I enjoy working under the premise that the
mind contains an infinite resource of personally unique ideas which are a
fusion of views collected over decades of natural observation combined with
assimilated imitations of historical art. Then it is the painter’s challenge
to retrieve them, to use his unique handwriting or brushwork to transfer them
to canvas. In this scheme, we have more stored, dormant information than we
will ever use in a lifetime.”
“I like to say that we’ve probably done enough
seeing in our lifetimes. Now it’s simply a matter of retrieving that
information and getting it down on canvas. For example, we know what trees
look like. We don’t need to educate people about their specific species or
anatomy. What we’re trying to capture is the feelings we have about trees, how
they grow out of the ground, what the light does to their shapes, texture and
color.”
“When the view of a natural object is taken
away, the replacement contains the essence of the thing, minus the anatomical
detail, stripped down to those emotional essentials.”
“This process, or dance, with the application
of paint, that trance- like yet cognitive working state with the emotional
response to the painting, is all more important to me than the documentation
of a contemporary scene.”
Born in 1955, Daniel lived in the northwest and
Alaska until 1970 when he moved to California where he has lived and painted
most of his life. He has traveled throughout Central America and Brazil. He
has a degree in Commercial Art and a BFA in Fine Art Studio Design.
Daniel is an accomplished studio painter and
muralist but has turned to location painting over the past few years in search
of a freshness in his work that is more difficult to achieve while working
indoors exclusively. “I painted in my studio out of necessity for many years
while my kids were young. Now I have the freedom to get out and explore the
landscape around me.
“I have never pursued a career through
affiliations, competitions, or by collecting awards. Not that those things
aren’t valuable. It’s always been a private struggle for me…to paint from my
heart, chase the light, and put as much emotion into the work as possible. I
paint because I need to.”
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A Little Light Left
14" x 18" oil
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Another Morning
11" x 14" oil
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Rocky Outcropping
9" x 12" oil
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B Street View
11" x 14" oil
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Oyster Shacks
14" x 18" oil
sold
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