Featured artist of the July: DP Warner

I have many great memories during the quarter century I have known the artist  DP Warner. The Meadville painter was a professor of mine at Edinboro University. We hit off after he gave my entire class a pretty scathing critique of our effort and work. I proceeded to paint a self portrait flipping the viewer the bird. Without hesitation at the next critique DP asked "is that for me?"
We've been friends ever since.
But the one story I want to share here relates directly to work he is doing now.
DP arrange a trip to Canada to look at art in the museums in and around Toronto. There were exhibitions on the collections of the artists known as The Group of Seven, Canadian Landscape painters during the roaring twenties and the Great Depression. DP was excited to look at these works even though, at the time, landscape painting in that sense wasn't really a  part of his work. These were not artist's that were in our history books so I had no idea what to expect. I wasn't a landscape painter either.
One artist, Tom Thomson, who wasn't technically in The Group of Seven, but was kind of the Neil Young to the Grunge movement, in that each artist credited Thomson for his influence on them.

I tagged along on this journey across the border.

DP's current work is quite different from the majority of his career where he explored themes such as abstractions based on musical rhythms and sounds in mostly jazz that somehow became Twombly-esque paintings; or his political art where his painting had punchlines in the titles if not directly through the imagery; or his bent takes on society and man's infiltration into natural wonders that became full show installations that read more as question marks than statements.
Today DP is a landscape painter.
In the traditional sense, he straps supplies to his back and sets up somewhere to paint.
His small works remind me of the time he and I opened drawer after drawer in the Toronto Museum of Art  housing The Group of Seven and Thomson's work.
One of my top art experiences.
DP was a part of two of my top art experiences actually.
Besides teaching me the proper way to drink a shot of tequila, DP taught me a great deal about pushing convention and not being afraid to experiment with other materials I never thought of as art supplies.
One spring and summer in the mid-nineties, he and I shared a barn loft for a studio. That was one of the greatest periods for my understanding or the creative process. We discussed over and over again navigation of surfaces and how serendipity can be embraceable when recognized. It was also a great space that occasionally had visitors like bats, mice and a cool barn owl that seemed to want to fly all around me one night and landed on the installation I was constructing.
This friendship and working relationship has lasted a long time and currently DP and I share a studio in Meadville. I love to walk back into his space and see what he's got going,,, plus he's a drummer in Touch of Grey and he and boys practice in my part of the studio sometimes.
Which is awesome when I am able to be there working in another room.
Over the next month I will showcase more of DP's work and perhaps more stories. I'll ask him for more insights and history of his over 50 years of creating and we might even tell you what the DP stands for.

This week I'm sharing a few of his images that relate, in my mind to that trip to Toronto, that I picked out from his instagram account.. You can follow DP at his website at https://www.dpwarner.com/ or on Instagram at ​https://www.instagram.com/dpwarnerartwww.instagram.com/dpwarnerart//