David Canright
David Canright is an artist and writer from Cleveland, Ohio. He studied art at the University of Texas at Austin with Peter Saul and Richard Thompson. After college he spent ten years in New York, where he exhibited work at several venues including Clementine Gallery, The Drawing Center, and the Yale University Gallery. He is currently making drawings and paintings in Dallas, and his work has been featured most recently at Conduit Gallery and the Dallas Art Fair.
Artist's Statement - The Built Environment
These detailed, playful drawings poke fun at the bravado and arrogance behind the modern compulsion to build ever bigger. The tendency to solve simple problems with overly complex technology. To create systems that are unwittingly self-defeating. To ignore the dangers of excess and the consequences of waste.
But these pictures are also an expression of my admiration for the sheer creativity, daring, and gleeful wonder that lie at the heart of science, architecture, and engineering. That pure, child-like spark essential to transforming crazy ideas into physical things. The pictures are an often nostalgic look at that rush all of us once felt while holding a crayon or a wooden block and wondering to ourselves, “wouldn’t it be cool if...” Through exaggeration and unfiltered imagination, I hope to capture that innocent excitement in fantastical structures that are both ridiculous and rooted in reality.
On a purely aesthetic level, I intend these picture to be simple, elemental and beautiful from a distance, while being richly intriguing up close. Each composition is dense with interlaced stories and surprising moments that I hope will reward the careful viewer for years to come.