Dan Mills

Directionalism
2 - 14 December 2007

Dan works in a captivating combination of abstraction and surrealism. His rich colour palate and sumptuous flowing forms will spark your imagination.

“This style of painting came about through, travel, work, practicality and a natural inclination to work on large canvas. I’ve painted murals for years, It’s how I scratch a living, and while travelling I painted a string of cheap hotels in foreign cities for the privilege of shelter.

I always needed drop sheets and I took at least one everywhere I went. Often the accidental paint on the drop sheet was more interesting to me than the mural. I took notes on the drop sheet; train times and phone numbers. I started doing the preliminary sketches for the mural on the sheet, I began to treat the random paint marks as a Rorschach test, rendering the splashes and blotches into an crystallized versions of my initial impression.

Before long I saw my canvases as earning their right to wall space though time served in the school of hard knocks. Each painting now evolves from chaotic accidents and raw sketches, into refined abstractions.”
-Dan Mills