Originally from Arkansas, educated in Colorado and New York and currently living in Denver, Daniel Sprick is an American painter who focuses on portraits, figures and still life, and occasionally landscape.
Sprick’s subjects are clearly observed, precisely drawn and rendered with finess, but to my eye, they always seem to carry with them an element of chaos — passages at the edges that feel rough and unfinished, a suggestion not only that this is paint on a surface, but a hint that reality itself is fuzzy at the edges, and perhaps this is a truer representation than absolute fidelity.
When you view the works in the portfolio and archives sections of his website, be sure to click the “view larger” link at the upper right of the images. The difference in size isn’t great, but Sprick’s approach is still more rewarding with an incremental increase in the size of the reproduction (leading, of course, to a wish that they were reprodied even larger).
In his still life subjects, I find a particular fascination in the way he uses texture and edges to control focus, again seeming to weave refinement and roughness into a coherent whole.
There are videos from the Denver Art Museum and the Delaware Art Museum in which Sprick briefly discusses his work, an interview on Painting Perceptions and an essay by Jane Fudge from the Denver Museum show archived on Sprick’s site.
