Dan Gottsegen is a painter who lives and works in rural Vermont. His work, praised by reviewers as “poignant”, “meditative”, “emotionally powerful”, and “haunting” reflects his active engagement with the natural environment. It is influenced by week or longer, completely solitary hikes in the high Sierra and other wild places, where he traveled miles off marked trails, camping and painting alone, often above ten-thousand feet, and his ongoing wilderness wanderings and meditations.
His recent work is influenced by his return to the natural landscape of the Northeast after over twenty years in San Francisco Bay Area. He often derives images by “capturing” video he shoots. In the “Die Wanderungen” series he combines and overlaps images, often improvisatorially. Said one prominent curator, “Gottsegen develops a composition that allows for combining and compressing different moments, in the way that the mind wanders when walking in the woods.”
For Gottsegen the act of painting is like the wandering and seeking he has done in the natural world. Imagery, often rising from deep memory, circulates in the paintings, as he finds harmonies and relationship. He is interested in painting that is luminous, that explores how we see and experience the world, and paint itself, playing often in the nexus between digital and painterly visual language.
An earlier raptor series reflects his experience for over a decade trapping, banding, measuring, and releasing hawks in California’s Marin Headlands to study their migration patterns. His involvement in this study was born out of many powerful encounters with owls and hawks that I had been having for years.
Gottsegen’s work has been exhibited nationally including one-person shows at the Feick Gallery at Green Mountain College (2007); the Karpeles Museum in Santa Barbara; Sylvia White Gallery in Santa Monica; Perkins Gallery in Stoughton, MA; the Prince Street Gallery in New York City; the Whistler House Museum in Lowell, MA; Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco; Soprafina Gallery in Boston; Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, and the Charleston Heights Gallery in Las Vegas. He has been in numerous (more than sixty) group exhibitions. His work is in numerous important collections.
Gottsegen has done large scale Public Art Projects; most recently, he created, selected from artist across the nation, a series of twelve large windscreen glass panels for the new light rail station in Westminster, CO, just outside of Denver (for the new line that will connect Denver to Boulder) commissioned by the Denver Regional Transportation District. He also has collaborated on several projects with Landscape Architect Terry Boyle including the South Burlington, VT City Center Gateway; Inside and Out, A Public Art Plan for Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center; and the new Vermont State Forensics Lab, a piece which combines Gottsegen’s painting, a public garden and outside glass installation.
Gottsegen has won many awards and fellowships. Recently he was selected from artists across the country to be the single Artist in Residence in 2017at the Cedar Key National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. He has been awarded a Vermont Arts Council Individual Artist Creation Grant. He is an “official juried” artist of the Vermont Arts Council; won the University Teaching Excellence Award at UMASS/Lowell; was an Affiliate (resident) artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA; and was a Nevada Artist-in- Residence, as well as an artist-in- residence at the Ucross Foundation, and a recent artist residency at Stiwdio Maelor in Corris, Wales.
Until recently Gottsegen was an Associate Professor of painting at University of Massachusetts/ Lowell, and taught for many years at California College of the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, achieving the rank of Full Professor. He has a BA from Brown University, and an MFA in Painting from California College of the Arts.
