David Sloan

Bio

David Jason Sloan was born on the unappreciated and scraggly old shores of Lake Erie in Ohio roughly 32 years ago to a clairvoyant seamstress mother and a tug-boat operating, mustached father. They divorced at age two setting up the geographical dichotomy that would influence his life forever. His mother moved to NYC and his father stayed in Ohio. Though he grew up in Ohio and attended Catholic elementary school, and though he attempted college at Kent State, the dusty academic separatists were not equipped for his exuberant schizophrenic and vulnerable life-force. Much to the chagrin of tight pants wearing, i-pod drooping, sexy young and willing female art students. He left for his mother’s territory and base in that metropolis on the east coast. For six years he had been living and painting in NYC under the study of only the incomparable, and deeply missed Don Stacy. David soon found a lovely lady whose zest for life rivaled his own and made her his wife. The two filled with wanderlust packed up and headed for new experiences in a mystique distant land, the Pacific Northwest. While their beloved city would always be an essential part of their life, they embraced Oregon and its lovely landscapes and people. Here in Portland, he has found a balance of a city beating to it’s own heartbeat and a call to nature he’d never experienced before.

The paintings are as if scenes in another world, or another planet, or maybe not even a planet, but another existence somehow scratched out, throwing back light on home, while showing you a room with beings that don’t exist on earth. But it looks like a bar scene. On what continent? What is that flying creature looming ominously over the primitive small figure in the red scarf? Where’s that man’s face? These colors, these colors don’t seem to be the ones I’m used to outside but they are not the televised kind either – they exist for paintings, for what paintings can do – and these figures with long slinky arms and legs looking for someone to talk to, trying to communicate. And shit, he uses acrylic paints (holy shit) and not oils!
–S.Doyle & H. Sloan