Open Painting

Daniel Callis (born in Long Beach, CA) is an artist and educator living in Southern California. He grew up an hour southeast of Los Angeles surrounded by orange groves, kidney shaped swimming pools, and historic Spanish Colonial Revival architecture. His childhood was immersed in the visual richness of the SoCal semi-desert coastal landscape, surf & car culture, and Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes cartoons. Callis received his BS in Drawing & Painting from California State University, Fullerton. He received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University which culminated with Callis receiving the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Graphic Arts Council’s, Young Talent Award. Working within a variety of media and visual traditions, Daniel Callis’s artwork speaks into personal and cultural histories that are continually updated, altered, discarded, reexamined, deconstructed and reconstructed. His work explores the poetics found at the intersection of materials, and process. The work is derived out of evolving practices, evidenced by labored surfaces of accumulation. Each work archives conversations between method and material, structure and concept. “Creating an abstract painting is a convergence of what I see, what I read and what I hear joined with the art-making process. The act of painting demands my attentiveness filtered through a matrix of intentionality and material. The canvases are a site of action and reaction, a turbulent space of metamorphosis and flux. Destruction and elimination, as well as addition and accumulation become a dynamic part of the methodology. The painting often bears witness to the clumsy and at times desperate search for its own meaning. I create an art form where struggle, and failure, can simultaneously be joyous, and hopeful.”