Here is an updated about me: https://davidwasko.com/new-abstract-art-artist-painting-self-taught/
I am a self taught contemporary painter from Pennsylvania who paints in any medium including oils, acrylics, watercolors, gouache, inks and other. I will also mix any medium to achieve the desired effect. I grew up using pastels and watercolors as a child and also enjoyed using available colored materials, creating images and scenes from anything that I could get my hands on. I would create landscapes and abstract work with rocks onto rock, walls or wood then later fill in with paint. As a child, house paint and spray paint was always available because we had a local Sherwin Williams store a few blocks over and they would throw out half empty cans of paint which I would always dumpster dive to retrieve. They didn’t have a metal dumpster, just a large area 24×24, somewhat enclosed, where they would dump the materials. As a child I would sneak up there with my wagon and load up on materials. The store would also throw out used brushes, wood and rolls of flooring so I always had something to paint on and we always had a nice tree house.
Growing up, brushes were like gold and if you painted with them and forgot to clean them, they would dry solid as a rock so finding other means of applying paint was essential. Later in life, you find that purchasing the most expensive or best reviewed brush doesn’t give you the desired feel. Some artists have a few specific brushes that they swear by because they have never learned to use anything else but I am not confined to any brush, object or material. Since I do not have a specific style of painting, I use whatever I’ve learned or style of painting to achieve the effect needed. This philosophy carries over to my brushes or lack of brushes.
I sometimes like to integrate something meaningful in my paintings, representative from which it came from so for example, I’ve used tree bark to create the bark on trees or you will see rocks in my paintings which were created by using actual rocks. When I first started painting with acrylics, the only brushes that I had were two hard plastic bristle brushes which would only scrape through the paint. I learned to practice and use whatever I had available and I firmly believe that practice is your best teacher.
A question sometimes asked, “Is creating art in your DNA” and this is a good question for anyone but I would say for me personally I believe that everyone has the ability to create or to invent but the key is through hard work and practice. I’ve played the guitar for many years now and just like with music, the more you practice the better you will become and the more you will learn. It’s always been practice, practice, practice and with practice comes confidence then it’s just second nature. When creating art, a person has to interpret everything inwards and outwards which means that it has to go through the filter first, your filter. The greatest tool the artist has is their imagination and it’s a special gift that allows you to create something from nothing.
All of my paintings are places in my mind, where I would want to be so I do not paint a landscape that I am visually looking at i.e. plein air painting nor do I paint from images and all of my paintings are painted in my outside studio, with the doors open and sometimes, snow blowing in. Achieving an emotional response over a visual response is a good goal and this is why I’ve always said, “Good art makes you look, Great art makes you experience.”
Here is an acrylic painting from many years ago, it’s a place in my mind where I would want to go.
