David FeBland, a wildly successful artist out of New York City, is currently showing at The Fraser Gallery in Bethesda. Go here to see most, if not all, of the paintings online. It seems to me that the digital images are much more muted online than they appear in real life.
FeBland had this to say about his show:
Some years ago, I began to produce paintings that expressed my best and worst impulses. Depicting elements I both feared and loved, I imbued anonymous figures with swaggering power, elevated faceless nobodies to subject status and filled the picture plane with stalking female mastodons, all in the service of expressing the anxiety of my urban life.Adversity loves company, and while living and working in New York, I found myself in the perfect place to observe the tribulations of others while forgetting about my own.
The body of work you will see at Fraser explores the ever-modulating space between aspiration and reality. It’s an uncomfortable space for some, that sense of not quite being where or what you think you are – a mental state filled with frission not unlike the combustible edge of colliding urban neighborhoods, its corporeal equivalent. After depicting just such city spaces for many years, I grew to understand that the concept of an edge - or more precisely the gap between them - was as much a state of mind as a physical reality and therefore eminently transportable. And so you see before you a body of vaguely autobiographical paintings embracing a variety of settings reflecting my everyday life, my travels grand and mundane, realized and imaginary.
Here are a couple of images I captured of my favorite pieces:
Plaza
Oil on Canvas
18 x 24 inches
Laws of Physics
Oil on Canvas
32 x 42 inches
FeBland's strong suits, in my opinion, include his ability to handle paint, the subtle, yet intriguing narratives he creates, and the sense of movement and tension in each piece no matter how seemingly mundane. The biggest weakness, again, in my opinion, is his color. FeBland is what the New York Times described as "the leading edge of the new urban realists," yet this New York City artist uses Palm Beach colors. The reason I picked the two paintings at top as my favorites was the more gritty nature of their colors.
FeBland sells a ton of paintings each year so he's clearly doing something right. It's insightful to see so many of his paintings in one location. That alone is worth the visit to Bethesda.
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