Biography from Mid Century Art:
| The modern movement has sold many people on the concept that painters
should be difficult, egotistical and socially maladjusted. In
contrast to this notion, the realist painter David Dalton is warm,
easygoing and modest. However, when you met him, his confidence
in his abilities is clear, as is the joy he derives from painting his
depictions of the beautiful inland valleys and coastline of
California. He is a happy and appreciative man, and decades into
his career, he is still thrilled to be able to make his living doing
something he loves to do - to paint places that are special to him and
share them with his audience.
Dalton was born in the Detroit
suburb of Pontiac, Michigan in 1952. Like most painters, he was
always interested in art, but because his father Lee T. Dalton was an
artist and his first teacher, his artistic pursuits were encouraged
rather than proscribed. In an interview held early in the artist's
career, he fondly recalled his father's influence: "My memories of art
lessons are clear. My father would sit me at the kitchen table
and teach me to draw and draw and draw."
Dave Dalton is the eldest of eight children - a large family by any
standards, but typical of the Mormon faith in which he grew up.
Two of his younger sisters share the family artistic talent and became
painters. Dalton moved to the beautiful California coastal town
of Santa Cruz to attend college. He pursued art at the university,
where he continued drawing and learned the basics of working in oils,
graduating in 1977 with a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts. By the
end of his college years, he began painting murals proessionally.
Dalton was always drawn to the water, and became a passionate surfer in
Santa Cruz. After college graduation, he moved from the moody
climes of Santa Cruz to sunny southern California, where he began
working as a substitute teacher to support his young family while
painting. Surfing in southern California inspired the artistic
impulse in Dalton, and he began assembling a small body of the ocean
works he had been painting to show galleries. The early influences the
artist cited were the great American marine painters Frederick Waugh
(1861 - 1940) and Winslow Homer (1836 - 1910). These works usually
depicted crisp, clear days at Malibu, Rincon, San Onofre or Huntington
Beach, all popular surfing spots along the southern and central
California coast. Dalton loved to paint the perfectly curled
waves he enjoyed riding and even included surfers in some of his first
marine paintings.
In 1979, he brought in a group of his
seascapes to show the well-known art dealer Howard E. Morseburg (b.
1924) and his gallery director Godfrey O. Gaston (1928 - 2002). While
these two dealers thought that Dalton's work needed some refinement,
they recognized that he was a natural talent who possessed the drive
and dedication that would make him an exceptional realist painter. The
young artist's works began selling immediately, and because of his
passion for the sea and his tremendous work ethic, the paintings
improved rapidly; soon he was traveling up and down the coast from
Oregon to the surfing spots on the rugged coast of Baja California in
search of subjects to paint.
Dalton's choice of galleries was
fortuitous, for Morseburg's Los Angeles gallery was a haven for marine
painters and collectors of marine works. The art dealer had spent five
years at sea during and after WWII, and because of his own love of the
sea, he represented many well-known marine painters, among them Eugene
Garin (1922 - 1994), Alexander Dzigurski (1911 - 1995) and Stephen
Mirich (b. 1954). Morseburg had his own gallery on Wilshire Boulevard
but also purchased Dalton's paintings to sell to other galleries in
California and as far away as the Midwest. Through the gallery's
promotion and the quality of Dalton's work, the painter soon gained a
national reputation and a long list of dedicated collectors.
What set Dalton's paintings apart from other artists of that era was
the clarity of his subjects. While he paints with a high degree
of detail, he retains a wonderful quality of natural light. Dalton
likes to say that painters should never "stick to one pat formula." As
an emerging painter he attempted to paint the sea and coast in all its
moods - the morning overcast burning off the warming southern
California coast, a storm surf pounding Santa Cruz, Point Lobos in the
fog that haunts that rugged coastline or a brilliant sunset in Baja
California - and he was equally adept at doing small paintings or major
works. As his career advanced, Dalton began painting more of the
coastline and less ocean, gradually making the transition to being a
landscape painter as well as a marine artist. In the mid-1980s,
he moved his family to central California, where he could find and
paint both less-inhabited stretches of coastline as well as landscape
subjects.
In 1985, as Howard Morseburg moved to Solvang and opened a gallery there, Dalton took on other gallery representation.
As the years progressed, he came to admire the landscape painter James
Fetherolf (1925 - 1994) and began to add the rolling hills and live oak
of inland California that the older artist was known for to his
artistic repertoire. Gradually, he began to paint more landscapes
and fewer marine works and now, as a mature artist with thirty years
behid the easel, David Dalton is as well known for his scenes of the
pristine California landscape as the marine paintings that got his
career off to such a rapid start. |
Biography from Alphanautical Gallery:
| David Dalton was born in 1952 in Pontiac, Michigan. The son of an artist, he has been involved in the arts most of his life. Upon graduating in 1977 with a degree in Fine Arts, he had a turning point in his artistic career when, on a weekend excursion, he visited Carmel, California. In touring more than forty galleries, he was greatly impressed by its art and was particularly moved by the work of renowned seascape painter Alexander Dzigurski. Thus with new enthusiasm and inspiration, Dalton decided to move to southern California and dedicate his career to painting ocean views.
Once settled on the West Coast, Dalton set a hectic schedule for himself of teaching by day and painting by night. He practiced different techniques, striving always to express himself in new ways through his brush. Soon, the young artist was working between ten and fourteen hours a day. His dedication reaped benefit, for just two years later an established art gallery in southern California decided to represent Dalton.
Dalton intends his luminous images of the pounding California surf and the spirited motion of the Pacific Ocean to be crisp, forceful and captivating. He layers color applications of blended oils to impart depth and perspective to his paintings which can be a California sunset, a landscape with oak shaded barns nestled into surrounding hills or the haunting moodiness of a silver-cast moon reflecting off ice-blue waters.
Through the years the works of James Fetherolf, an American Contemporary Landscape painter have inspired Dalton.
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