David Hartwell

David believes that representation cannot be separated from craft. That the idea for a painting isn't a painting. Skills are improved through repetition. Practice learned as a means to a fixed end will hamper creativity. Repetitiveness can be of the evolving kind with each input-output feedback loop maturing at each cycle, the post- influencing the pre- and so on. Stored memories are retrieved. Their retrieval will in turn influence the artist who will impart that change on the next one, ad infinitum. Very quickly, the acts of photographing and editing; “the craft”; will modify an artist’s understanding and memory of the subject. Art is bias and processes are biased. Reality is a fluid concept when in the hands of a capable craftsman.

David Hartwell is a Pasadena-based photographer. A British citizen, he was born and raised in French speaking Switzerland. David was formally trained as a photographer taking workshops given by such luminaries as Guy Le Querrec, Luc Chessex and Raymond Depardon before obtaining his BFA in 1991 from Art Center College of Design (Europe). He emigrated to the United States in 1992 where he cut his teeth working for pioneers of the burgeoning multimedia industry. He spent the next twenty-five years dev...

1988-1991 BFA(1991) Art Center College of Design (Europe), Switzerland

1986-1987 Centre d’Enseignement Photographique Professionel, Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland

2021 Terra Botanica: Depictions of Nature from The National Collection
National Gallery of the Cayman Islands
Permanent Collection

2021 Homegrown: Botanical Portraits
National Gallery of the Cayman Islands
Permanent Collection

2021 Watt is Art: Photovoltaic Art
EPFL Pavilions
Lausanne, Switzerland

2019 Photo-synthesis
5th International Art and Science Symposium and Exhibition (TASIES 2019)
Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University National Museum of China, Tiananmen Square, Beijing

2019 Go West, Young Man
Louis Poulsen Showroom and Gallery, Helms Bakery
Culver City, California

2018 Vessel of Change
Wende Museum of The Cold War
Culver City, California

2016 Median
WUHO Gallery
Hollywood, California

2014 Competing Utopias: East Meets West in One Context
Neutra VDL Studio and Residences
Los Angeles, California

2011 There Might Be A Well: The Architecture of Donal Wexler
Palm Springs Art Museum
Palm Springs, California