“Boulevard Of Broken Dreams”: The Superb Paintings Of David FeBland

David FeBland was born in London, UK and has received degrees from The University of Virginia, USA and The University of Manchester, UK. A self-taught artist, FeBland pursued careers in Landscape Architecture and Communication Design as well as hosting jazz radio programs before turning his attention to painting in the mid-1980’s. Since 1984, he has bicycled through 55 countries around the world, often using his observations as inspiration for his painting.

FeBland’s work considers issues of privacy, conflict and isolation in contemporary urban life, employing a colorist’s eye and a strong sense of formal compositional structure. He describes the interaction between man and his physical universe through a series of invented truths, a sleight of the facts as it were, inspired by observations of everyday life throughout the world. His paintings, drawing upon experiences over a wide range of geographical locations, are driven by a conviction that certain behavioral responses to ones environment are universal.

Critics describe his paintings as such: “These images are disarmingly involving. His ability to instill strongly emotive elements into his work also hints at the more graphic work of Ben Shahn and Diego Rivera. It suggests an evolution of socially conscious realism that both Ashcan artists and Shahn flirted with, a very modern response to the Soviet socialist movement that embraces its more expressive elements…. {this is} a quality that gives the movies of Spike Lee their poignancy, and it’s a spirit that FeBland’s works achieve better than his contemporaries.”

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