DAVID TANNER Richmond, VA, EU 'PORTRAIT'

My name is David Tanner and I’m a representational oil painter. I live and work in Richmond, Virginia. My first love as a painter is depicting the human figure, but I also enjoy plein-air landscape painting and still-life. Here's a video with an overview of my process. Background & Training: As a kid, I loved drawing and painting, and thankfully had encouraging parents. When it came time for college, there was no question that I would study art, although what kind of art wasn’t so clear. I had never met anyone who actually made a living as an artist. So, I studied commercial illustration at Virginia Commonwealth University because it seemed like a financially viable career choice in the arts, and got my BFA degree in 1991. After graduating and getting some experience, however, I realized my heart wasn’t in commercial illustration. I wanted to be a traditional painter creating work for galleries, rather than creating ads for corporations. In my first 10 years out of school, I waited tables while pursuing my painting. Since people were my favorite subjects, I sought commissioned portraits as a way to pay some bills and more importantly, improve my skills through practice. You see, I really didn’t have all that much basic painting instruction from VCU. They were far more interested in concepts, and less so in technique. So I was basically teaching myself post-college. By the early 2000’s the commissioned portrait work was consistent and I no longer had to wait tables to pay the rent. And even though I was proud of what I had accomplished as self-taught painter, I knew there were many gaps in my learning. The growing atelier movement — learning from master painters in their workshop – came onto my radar, so I decided to check out some of the small painting academies that provide a traditional education in painting the human figure. This type of education was the mainstay of western art until the mid-20th century when abstraction and modernism declared that representational painting was dead. Between 2003 and 2008, I traveled regularly to study with some superb figurative artists. A few multi-week workshops with Nelson Shanks at his Studio Incaminati in Philadelphia were critical in my development, as were weekly classes with Robert Liberace at the Art League in Alexandria, Virginia. Both teachers coupled an Impressionist approach to seeing color with an academic approach to draftsmanship. For the first time, I was learning solid principles of painting from life. In both experiences, it was gratifying to realize how much I knew already through self-teaching, but also enlightening to understand how I could improve and streamline my process. There’s a real distinction in my work before and after my training. My work became looser after my training, but ironically more accurate than my earlier, tighter realism. I suppose I was finally learning how to say more with less.