David Copson has an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Minnesota and over 30 years of experience working professionally in the fine arts. His area of emphasis in graduate school was printmaking. This lead to employment at several fine art lithography workshops in New York City beginning in 1975. He established Inyo Studio in 1978 to provide specialized services to printmaking artists and printmaking studios. He was employed primarily at the prestigious Atelier Ettinger where he became Technical Director in 1984. He left that position in 1994 to relocate his family to rural Virginia.
David is well known in the printmaking community for his work as a free-lance chromist. A chromist is a specialist at creating hand drawn color separations which, when printed one at a time in a specifically matched color, create the print image. A chromist is akin to a ghostwriter. David is the technical expert artists rely upon to translate their work into original print media.
David has collaborated on lithographs with over 100 artists including: Alex Katz, Marisol Escobar, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Norman Rockwell, Nancy Grossman, Andy Warhol, Alice Neel, Romare Bearden, Peter Max, Roy Lichtenstein, Malcolm Liepke, Ernst Neizvestny, Mikhail Chemiakin, Hughie Lee Smith, Al Hirschfeld and Waldamir Swierzy. Organizations that have benefited from his work include the Russian State Museum, the Smithsonian Institute, the World Federation of United Nations Associations, Warner Brothers Studios, the Special Olympics Committee, the Kandinsky Society, the Mucha Foundation, and the American Film Institute.
Beginning in 2005, David has refocused his energy on his own paintings. He brings together diverse influences - from Cherokee Mysticism, sacred geometry, and Feng Shui, to pictures from the Hubble Telescope - to evoke the sublime in work that challenges our consensual reality.
I paint images to arouse awe. I want to evoke the sense of cosmological wonder that one experiences when looking at a picture from the Hubble Telescope.
Often those astronomical pictures provide a new view by means of an optical filter or by presenting a normally invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. To help us make sense of them, they may also be enhanced by computer programs. The depth of such pictures is often measured in billions of years. Clearly, there is no reason to believe such pictures are objectively true. They are but a metaphorical tool to aid our understanding.
Likewise, my images are metaphors for unknown physical or metaphysical phenomena. They are not fields of color or non-representational forms. They are about something. But not about my own feelings or the mysteries of my own personality.
My images are ambiguous and suggestive - universal yet personal - open to intuitive comprehension by your personal inner filters. I want to capture your imagination with the question, “What is this I am looking at?”
It is our nature to catalog incoming information into established paradigms of our physical and psychological world. Philosophers and scientists know that these conceptualizations are evolving and not rooted in concrete reality. In my work, I offer images that suggest a different reality or invite a paradigm shift in our understanding of reality.
Each painting is infused with an energy dynamic that moves you out of alignment with your normal perceptions of the world. Here is something that is reminiscent of the familiar, but with a twist, an anomaly, something unexpected and heretofore unexplained.
I find fascinating viewer explanations of what they see as they try to make these images fit into the consensus reality in which we are all normally so heavily invested. As with life itself, your perception of this work is wholly dependent on the meaning and consciousness that you bring to it. It is my hope that your perception leads, as mine does, to the sublime, the inspirational, and perhaps even the divine.
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