BIOGRAPHY

David N. Goldberg

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I was born in New York City in 1951. My mother and my aunt were both aspiring artists and studied at the Brooklyn Museum School. They introduced me to impressionist painting and various other modern art movements when I was a child. My mother influenced me by taking me to all the art museums in New York City .When I was 11, at summer camp I painted sets for a production that was overseen by Earl Robinson, composer of Ballad for Americans. At another summer camp at Dartmouth, New Hampshire where I participated in a softball tournament, I wandered into the basement of the University Library, there to my amazement was a mural by Orozco called Migration of the Western Spirit. At age 15, I studied art privately in Queens NY with Lillian Schwartz who encouraged me to notice my natural talent as a painterly colorist. While at Russell Sage Jr High I took art classes and continued to follow through with my interest in drawing and painting at Forest Hills High School.

In 1969 I entered the BFA program of the State University College at New Paltz. The campus is ninety miles north of NYC in the Hudson River Valley. It was known at that time for the art education program. My most profound influence at the college was a drawing and painting instructor named Alex Minewski. Mr. Minewski studied with Hans Hoffman in NYC and with Nicolaides, the author of The Natural Way to Draw, in Paris. He imbued me with an unflinching determination to develop and trust my own vision of art. In 1973 I was awarded first place in an undergraduate show juried by Alan Frumkin owner of a well known 57th street art gallery in Manhattan. After leaving New Paltz, I made a pilgrimage by bus to Mexico City and Guadalajara to see Jose Clemente Orozco’s murals. The experience at Dartmouth never left me and I was inspired to see his other works in person. He portrayed his humanism spirituality & politics in a fiery imagery which I found compelling.

In 1974 I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. There I discovered a city surrounded by the dramatic natural beauty of the Pacific Coast. It possessed a magical atmosphere that had obvious influences of the Beat and Hippie movements. The poetry readings and vibrant music scene were invaluable sources of inspiration. The Bay Area afforded rare chance meetings with people I admired such as Robert Rauschenberg and Imogene Cunningham. Mr. Rauschenberg, humble and kind offered this advice to me, “…just keep painting.” I met Ms. Cunningham at an exhibition of hers at the De Young Museum. I was very impressed with her young spirit and uncompromising aesthetic integrity. I attended figure-drawing classes at the San Francisco Art Institute and continued to paint in my inimitable style of Figurative Expressionism. I worked as an artist’s model at City College of SF, Santa Rosa CC and also painted houses to support myself. I devoted as much time to painting as possible. I often hung out in North beach cafes where I sketched the local characters. In addition I filled my sketchbooks with colorful non-objective drawings where the harbinger of the next phase of my imagery was developing. By 1981 I was painting almost exclusively non-figurative. My way of painting continued to develop into grafittiesque and geometric movements. I built my own lexicon of form and color.

In 1990, I moved to Seattle, Washington. I lived in the Ravenna neighborhood just north of the University of Washington. I worked in my house teaching art and continued my house painting as well. I had many art shows in various venues such as The Virginia Inn, The Fourth Avenue Plaza, and The Painted Table. After a two-year return to NYC in 1998, I came back to the Pacific Northwest and resettled in Tacoma where I have a studio. Since then I have shown at the Kittredge Gallery at University of Puget Sound , The Gallery at Tacoma Community College and AOC Gallery.