The Persistence of Memory Print

Dan Gottsegen is a painter who lives and works in rural Vermont. His work, praised by reviewers as "poignant", "meditative", "emotionally powerful", and "haunting". His work has long been based on his active engagement with the natural environment. It is influenced by week or longer, completely solitary hikes in the high Sierra and other wild places, where he traveled miles off marked trails, camping and painting alone, often above ten-thousand feet, and his ongoing wilderness wanderings and meditations. His recent work is influenced by his return to the natural landscape of the Northeast after over twenty years in San Francisco Bay Area. In this work, he often derives images by "capturing" bits from video that he shoots. This allows him to find compositions and qualities that might not be seen readily pre-visualizing, the accidental composition. In the "Die Wanderungen" series he combines and overlaps images, often improvisatorially. Said one prominent curator, "Gottsegen develops a composition that allows for combining and compressing different moments, in the way that the mind wanders when walking in the woods." The act of painting is for Gottsegen much like the wandering and seeking he has done in the natural world. Bit of imagery, often rising from deep within memory, circulate in the paintings, as he finds harmonies and relationship. He is interested in painting that is luminous, that explores the ways in which we see and experience the world, and paint itself, playing often in the nexus between digital and painterly visual language. An earlier raptor series reflects his experience for over a decade trapping, banding, measuring, and releasing hawks in California's Marin Headlands to study their migration patterns. His involvement in this study was born out of many powerful encounters with owls and hawks that I had been having for years. Gottsegen's work has been exhibited nationally including one-person shows at the Feick Gallery at Green Mountain College (2007); the Karpeles Museum in Santa Barbara; Sylvia White Gallery in Santa Monica; Perkins Gallery in Stoughton, MA; the Prince Street Gallery in New York City; the Whistler House Museum in Lowell, MA; Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco; Soprafina Gallery in Boston; Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, and the Charleston Heights Gallery in Las Vegas. He has been in numerous (more than sixty) group exhibitions. His work is in numerous important collections.