Dan O’Kane has lived a nomadic existence. Seattle, Phoenix, Boston, New York and the mountains of New Hampshire, are just a few of the places he’s called home. His painterly abstractions, however, are shaped primarily by the big-sky and rolling plains of his childhood Nebraska home. A stark horizon line is a fitting starting point for his exuberant color field paintings.
Artist Statement:
I am a colorist by nature. Since childhood the interaction of bold flat colors has fascinated me. The hip, psychedelic, pattern-based magazine adds of the late 60s and early 70s were my earliest visual thrills. Later, I was attracted to the post- modernists Josef Albers, Ad Reinhard, Mark Rothko and Brice Marden.
My abstractions are loosely based in nature; I say loosely, because my goal is not to paint something, but rather to find something. Negative and positive space, the juxtaposition of colors, light and shadow, the basic elements of the physical world, are things I recognize and lean into as I apply and remove layers of paint to the surface. The idea of finding rather than presenting an image is dicey and the failure rate is large, at least in my case.
Very often I find nothing and slink away from the studio shoulders hunched. But I always comeback, because to be a artists in the 21st century one must be a masochist.
In my current work, I am interested in how the juxtaposition of certain colors creates the perception of depth and movement, and in some instances a sense of optical confusion. By adding a distilled, man-made element, in this case a generic architectural form, to fields of color, I am able to create a moment of visual dissonance. This raises the eternal question of what we think we see, verses what is actually there.