David Neufeld’s work is about finding beauty in the collision of images. From the time he began drawing as a child, David was fascinated by nature and experimented with ways to reflect on, change and enhance the images he saw. His latest work has been called surreal, and yet it is completely made of real images - photos of places, people, objects, colors, patterns. Nothing is made up. It is all of our world but transformed.
David’s latest work, “Spirit of the Body”, transforms nudes into mythological and archetypal figures through the use of complex merging techniques that DO NOT use Artificial Intelligence.
Biography
David Neufeld began his career as an artist at age seven. His frequent visits to the Brooklyn Museum of Art imprinted images in his mind that he carries to this day and his wanderings in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens planted the seeds for a vocation in landscape design.
Later, he pursued painting, primarily landscapes, wherever he traveled and lived. His 1973 paintings are in the permanent collection of Death Valley National Park. In his early twenties, he partnered with a potter and for eight years crafted wood-fired stoneware and porcelain. In 1980, a chance to study with renowned mime and actor, Tony Montanaro, developed into a sixteen-year professional storytelling career with over 2,500 performances in the U.S. and abroad. As his grasp of narrative grew, writing followed, resulting in some thirty books for children, newspaper columns, and magazine articles.
His life as a touring artist ended in 1996 so that he could raise a family but his early love of landscape returned to support them. He started a landscape design and stone masonry company and in the past sixteen years he has become a leading expert in the construction of traditional wood-fired brick ovens.
As is often the case with artists who wish to remain working artists, David’s various self-employment careers have overlapped: Painting with pottery, storytelling with writing, landscape design with photography, stonework with sculpture; all of them image-making. In 2013, he returned to college for a Masters of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts which spliced a sculpture practice with the study of Jungian psychology.
Artistic Forms
For the past five years David has worked on photographic portraiture through the surface of water. These self-portraits can be found at Through The Water
Merging photos reflects David’s love of the natural world and his passion for testing the limits of media. He has always pursued avenues of the arts that demonstrate the existence of deep evidence; the consciousness that we are swimming in a world far greater than ourselves.
David’s found object sculptures began as his Master’s thesis combining Carl Jung’s philosophy of collective unconscious with the use of discarded objects, both man-made and natural.
Altered Books are another area of interest. David is fascinated by the effects of time and weather and other forces as they affect an object. As an author and storyteller he sees the affects as a commentary and sometimes links the content of the book itself to the process, for example Booker T Washington’s Up From Slavery and the found object chains.
Some of the early Mergings included reimagining the human body in different environments.
There are also surreal landscape images. Many of these are currently on view at the Pritchard Gallery of the Copper Queen Library in Bisbee, Arizona.
David has also created both permanent and ephemeral installations commenting on the environment and the human condition.
In 2008 David’s landscape work led him into the creation of a wood-fired brick oven, based on designs he had seen in Italy. Since showing his first oven at a garden show, David has been commissioned to create over 65 ovens from Spain to California. David’s ovens are carefully crafted to perform to high standards of heat development and heat retention and are also beautifully finished.
David’s landscape designs also reflect his belief that the best artist is nature and the finest landscapes feel authentic, as if they had always been that way. In a way they meld right into the photographs of Mergings. David designed and installed over 400 residential and institutional landscapes.
David’s latest public art feature is the Stratas of Time Water Feature at the Copper Queen Library Annex in Bisbee, Arizona.
Latest but certainly not last, David has been commissioned by homeowners in Bisbee Arizona to redesign historic houses, many of which began as miner’s shacks circa 1900. His acute sense of history as well as space planning, visual sense, understanding of materials and construction techniques are all contributing to the success of this latest venture, called SPACE.
Have a question or a comment? Contact David using the form below.