Galleries

In the lush world of Daniel Tucker’s pastels, we feast upon colors. It’s as if we find ourselves in the middle of an artist’s personal and idiosyncratic journey. Here, the viewer’s eye can skip over a richly ornamented kingdom, over hill and dale, to reassess a question vital to all of us: what is the game of life and how do we play it with our whole heart?

When we look at these paintings, surely reminiscent of cave paintings but also of Marc Chagall and Paul Klee and Kandinsky and Gustave Klimt and Alice in Wonderland, we are welcomed by the velvety warmth of pure pigment, as well as by a sense that any one of us can and will interpret them differently. That all interpretations could be interesting and somehow true – even if Tucker’s narrative of them is as specific as it is grand. The best compliment he could imagine receiving about one of his paintings? That someone can’t stop looking at them.

“I love pastels because I can hold them in my hand; the colors are raw and saturated. They are fragile to the touch but will last thousands of years undisturbed. I’m an old cave painter. I use my hands to faithfully transmit what is in the heart. I can’t imagine expressing feelings on paper without using my hands”.

At this point in his life, Tucker finds himself more and more drawn to the “effortless reality” of creating paintings, a place many artists dream of being linked with on a regular basis.“I mostly start a painting from exactly where I am. The last couple years, it generally feels like the painting is painting itself — that I’m not ‘doing’ painting. I am enchanted by the experience of it and find myself engaged in painting 24/7/365.”

“As a more mature (and childlike) artist, the difference I notice between then and now is I that have something to say about what is important to me–and that I can paint it with greater transparency and clarity. Not only has the process changed from one of being a bulldozer scraping the surfaces, but also now I could say the process is ‘streaming.’