art blog

I really like Daniel Merriam. I first became acquainted with his work when he exhibited at a local gallery here in San Francisco about 3 years ago. I’d never really been a fan of so-called “fantasy art” (fairies and elves and whatnot), but in Merriam’s work there is a tension and energy you just don’t see in the fantasy genre. It owes, I think, to the interplay between light and dark forces — good and evil, if you will. Some of his pieces are evocative of the gargoyles and grotesques of Bosch.

Others are as airy as Norman Rockwell meets Seurat.

The most interesting pieces are the ones where both those elements are evident, but held in balance.

Leonardo da Vinci was an engineer to the core. While contemporary painters were busy wrapping the human form in Romantic gauze, Leonardo was exposing structure and function with the same perfected clinical reverence to detail we see in his mechanical designs.