Remnants - Dead Leaf Mantis Sculpture

OEAA 2019 Best New Media Artist OEAA 2018 Best Group Show - Museum of Alternative History, Kaneko Omaha Nebraska --- Reagan Davis Pufall was shaped by his childhood growing up in North Dakota. Its long cold winters coupled with short and stormy summers instilled in him a permanent sense of restlessness and the drama of nature. Winter days trapped indoors by bitter cold led him to adopt a lifelong habit of reading. He reads broadly, and in his youth particularly enjoyed exploring the worlds presented in classic fiction, fantasy, science fiction, and the ancient mythology of many cultures. Once winter lifted the warming spring weather would lead him outdoors to explore the open countryside around him; away from the worlds contained in books and into the wide open world of the northern plains. Later, his family moved south to Nebraska, which has a more moderate four seasons climate. Ironically, this shift inverted his calendar; now it was the bright and bracing – but not bitterly cold – days of winter that lured him out into the natural world of the prairies. In high school he was introduced to photography by a teacher who encouraged both his still life and landscape work. At first his work focused primarily on landscapes, and he loved the hiking and camping that were required to capture those images. However, he eventually found that ground had already been well explored and captured by the photographers and painters who had come before him. During and after the years he spent at the San Francisco Art Institute, he returned to the studio and began creating his own landscapes, inspired to bring into tangible existence the worlds he had encountered in the real and fictional stories of his youthful reading. Currently he lives in Omaha Nebraska where he teaches Art and Design.