Gallery 1261 Unveils New Daniel Sprick Painting at Denver Art Showcase

“In the last 10 to 20 years, I’ve slowed myself down. There is such a thing as being too prolific,” Sprick said in an interview with Art & Object. “My work is really, really labor intensive, so it’s part of my plan to do small paintings as good as I can possibly make them, no matter how much labor goes into it. The world has plenty of quantity. We don’t need any more quantity, we need quality,” said Sprick.

The quality results from Sprick’s self-imposed standard of excellence: “I maintain higher ideals than ever,” the artist said. “In spite of what’s going on in the world and my opinions about contemporary art, I think genuine, authentic, heartfelt beauty is still possible in the world. And the world absolutely needs beauty more than ever.”    

Sprick spoke of the radical shifts in the art market. “It’s changing under our feet, and I’m not sure what to make of it,” he said. “I do the best art I’m capable of so I can be at peace with myself. I’m no pioneer of new aesthetics. I’m discovering what’s possible within representation, and I’m not satisfied. There’s room for growth. That’s why I keep painting. There are undiscovered continents that may or may not exist, but I’m sailing out for them.”

Sprick invites other painters aboard on his artistic voyage. He leads painting workshops. He regularly hosts a group of painters in his studio.

He said, “We have maybe 20 artists with a model in the center, and we are painting or drawing. We do what we can get done in three to three-and-a-half hours. We are industrious. We work hard. We maintain silence. I demand everybody turn off their cell phone ringer.”

The group includes Sprick’s studio neighbor, Quang Ho, and his wife, Adrienne Stein, both celebrated artists living half-time in Denver, both represented by Gallery 1261, both showing paintings in the Denver Art Showcase. 

Another regular is Clyde Steadman, an impressive impasto painter whose style couldn’t be much more different from Sprick’s. Steadman’s Denver representative, Abend Gallery, will exhibit the painter’s series of female figures in the Art & Object Denver Art Showcase. Prior to the figure-painting group, Steadman painted with Sprick in his Denver studio and studied still-life with him intensively, one-on-one for six months. 

“He has achieved a kind of fame. I call myself a Daniel Sprick fan boy shamelessly, and that happens to him repeatedly, said Steadman. “If he’s in a room of people familiar with representational painting, people shut up like in the old EF Hutton ads. People stop conversations and listen to what Dan says."

What Steadman says, simply put, is that Sprick is extraordinary. 

“He’s not a monk, but he’s almost a monk. He’s incredibly focused,” Steadman said of Sprick. “One of the things I like to see in artists — and I definitely see in his work — is he shows you his inner life in his paintings. I could tell you things about him, but that would not tell as much as his paintings.”

Steadman told of Sprick’s generosity, his marathon attention span. And he commented on the slightly eerie, dream-space look of Sprick’s paintings, a reality not altered, but painstakingly observed.

“Dan pays attention far beyond what most people would be able to. Things are revealed when you are willing to go past the point of normal attention and refine the painting,” said Steadman, who studied philosophy and mathematics before veering toward art. 

“I’m not in his league, but Dan’s painting is more and more focused, more and more clear, so it takes on an otherworldly quality because it records all that attention he’s put into it. You look at his painting and see that he has paid attention to every crease on a person’s face — not to exaggerate or underplay it because that would not be paying attention.”  

Steadman emphasized that Sprick is not a photorealist — a label Sprick shuns. 

“Dan’s paintings, finally, are painterly. Dan’s paintings retain a kind of virtuosic fluency in just the manipulation of paint. Something trails off, and it’s happening everywhere in the painting if you look carefully enough,” said Steadman. 

“He’s been doing this so long that he’s developed a skill in handling the paint that is foreign to the photorealistic school. The term ‘photorealism’ is appropriate for some, but not for Dan. Dan’s very much a painter.”