DAVID TYCHO

Painting, Digital Art, Photography

City: Vancouver, British Columbia

Website: http://www.tychoart.com

Artist Statement: I live in Vancouver, a city where natural and fabricated elements collide, overlap and coexist. The route from my home to my studio bisects an assortment of districts: from manicured beachside parks, to concrete canyons in the downtown core; from leafy residential neighbourhoods, to derelict slums and industrial sprawl. This daily journey is a cross section and microcosm of human urban experience, and one that never ceases to inspire and inform my work.

My creative process involves absorbing and subsequently synthesizing these external elements into personal descriptions, reactions and interpretations, drawing upon my own formal preoccupations with line, shape, colour, gesture and texture. Although natural and built environments are used as starting points, the paintings evolve and transform in an intuitive fashion to the point where representational elements are distilled, intensified and even obliterated by subconscious narratives and aesthetic impulses. The resulting works are a coalescence of external and internal forces, so to speak.

My imagery is both architectural and organic, often conveying the uneasy relationship between seemingly disparate environmental elements. The works act as visual and psychological metaphors for all that a city thrusts at us.

Biography: David Tycho was born in Vancouver and attended the University of British Columbia, where he studied painting under renowned Canadian artist Gordon Smith. After graduating, David moved to Asia for four years, an experience which had a deep and lasting effect on his art.

For the past 30 years, David’s art has straddled the genres of abstraction and representation, at times more experimental and intuitive and at other times more reflective of his surroundings. His works are inspired by subjects ranging from pristine wilderness to urban sprawl, to the people he encounters along the way. In addition to painting, in 2020 Tycho began working with photography and digital media, resulting in digital composite photo images printed on aluminum.

David has exhibited his work in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Geneva, Brussels, Zurich, Singapore and Manila, and his paintings and prints are collected worldwide. He and his work have been the subject of numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and he is often interviewed on podcasts, radio and television.