Davia DeNisco

Artist Statement

Everything I paint begins with a moment of pause, something easy to walk past that I stopped for instead. Some of those leave a picture behind: a field in early cold, the tiled edge of a pool, the red a beach umbrella throws down into its own shadow. Others leave a sensation: the heat before a thunderstorm, light coming through a porch screen, the ease of a mild overcast afternoon.
The first kind begins from a reference and sheds most of its detail. I crop, simplify, decide what to leave out. What I’m after isn’t the place itself but its residue: a shadow at its longest, light in the minutes before it goes. I build in transparent layers, letting color accumulate until the light feels like it’s coming from somewhere.
The second kind stays with me as a glow, a temperature, how long the light held. Those paintings keep it in that form. Both finish the same way: when the painting is carrying the feeling I made it for. More often now the two arrive together: an airport at night, a green channel light on the water, a lit window across the ice. A real place, at a real hour, kept as glow and duration rather than as a view.
I work small on purpose. A painting this size can catch you from across a room and then pull you closer. It’s that second part, where the layers and the shifts in color open up, that I make the work for.