Richard L. Dana

"My work is an inquiry into the dualities of life such as: emotion and reason; spirit and flesh; spontaneity and order; woman and man; the abstract and the concrete. In identifying these black and white poles, I am particularly interested in the more colorful gray regions in between, where humans actually live. Flowing from this, my work deals with an individual’s place in the world, either in a more general or more specific sense, and, most often through the depiction of or allusion to a mental or emotional state".

Richard L. Dana is an artist, independent curator, and arts administrator based in Washington, DC. He has exhibited his artwork extensively throughtout the United States and in the following countries: Belgium, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Russia, Senegal, South Africa, Taiwan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

Mr. Dana concentrates principally on mixed media painting and drawing, although he also has been moving into installation territory recently. The artist’s work ranges rather far and wide, from very small to very large, from abstract to representational, from black and white to intensely colorful. Mr. Dana's art deals, in general, with things affecting women, men and children.

Mr. Dana is a self-taught artist. He received an undergraduate degree in Russian Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1975 and a master's degree in International Relations from Johns Hopkin's School of Advanced International Studies in 1977. He worked as an economist and Soviet Affairs expert in Washington, D.C. from 1977 to 1984. Having spent much of his free time painting since preparatory school, he decided in 1984 to turn this increasingly passionate pastime into a full-time career and has been creating art ever since.