Dana Gordon

About

Dana Gordon is an American abstract painter whose exuberant work has for decades directly explored the potential of mark-making and line to create meaning-imbued color, shape, and space. In recent years, he increasingly pushed his line into the expressive possibility of liquid calligraphy. For Gordon "abstract painting can express human nature and experience in full — through meaning, feeling, and beauty in visual form." As a multidisciplinary artist, Gordon also has written about art, designed sets for opera and dance, and, in the period 1968-78, made avant-garde films as well as paintings. He lives and works in New York City. Education Gordon was born in Boston in 1944 and grew up in Chicago. He has spent his artistic career in New York City since 1967, with the exception of years in the 1970s when he taught at the Universities of Michigan, Massachusetts and Wisconsin, and the Honolulu Museum of Art. The artist received a BA in art from Brown University in 1966 and an MA in art from Hunter College in 1969. He worked as assistant to artists Tony Smith and George Sugarman in their studios in the late 1960 s [i] In 1966-67, Gordon studied photography with Aaron Siskind at the ID in Chicago. In addition to painting, Gordon also made avant-garde films during 1967-78 , shown in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and film museums internationally. Gordon’s writing on art (particularly on Camille Pissarro) has appeared in Commentary Magazine, the Wall Street Journal [ii] , the New York Sun, the Jerusalem Post, and Painter’s Table [iii] . Gordon was one of the founders of New York’s Painting Center in 1993 [iv] His painting can be seen at danagordon.net . As a child, the artist was very close to his maternal grandfather who was a Talmudic scholar and in whom the young Gordon found a loving spirituality. Gordon moved with his family to Chicago when he was only five. His mother introduced him to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings at the Art Institute