Dan Gottsegen is a painter who lives and works on his farm and forest land in rural Vermont where he lives close to nature, cutting his own firewood for heat, growing much his own food, and exploring the deep woods around him. He returned to the natural landscape of the Northeast after over twenty years in San Francisco Bay Area, where he taught for many years at California College of the Arts.
Gottsegenβs work, praised by reviewers as βpoignantβ, βmeditativeβ, βemotionally powerfulβ, and βhauntingβ reflects his lifelong engagement with the natural environment. It is influenced by week or longer, completely solitary hikes in the high Sierra and other wild places, where heβs traveled miles off marked trails, camping and painting alone, often above ten-thousand feet, and his ongoing wilderness wanderings and meditations.
In some pieces he derives images by βcapturingβ video he shoots. In the βDie Wanderungenβ series he combines and overlaps images, often improvisatorially. Said one prominent curator, βGottsegen develops a composition that allows for combining and compressing different moments, in the way that the mind wanders when walking in the woods.β
For Gottsegen the act of painting is like the wandering and seeking he has done in the natural world. Imagery, often rising from deep memory, circulates in the paintings, as he finds harmonies and relationship. He is interested in painting that is luminous, that explores how we see and experience the world, and in paint itself, playing often in the nexus between digital and painterly visual language.
An earlier raptor series reflects his experience for over a decade trapping, banding, measuring, and releasing hawks in Californiaβs Marin Headlands to study their migration. His involvement in this study was born out of many powerful encounters with owls and hawks that he had been having for years.
Gottsegenβs work has been exhibited nationally including one-person shows at the Feick Gallery at Green Mountain College (2007); the Karpeles Museum in Santa Barbara; Sylvia White Gallery in Santa Monica; Perkins Gallery in Stoughton, MA; the Prince Street Gallery in New York City; the Whistler House Museum in Lowell, MA; Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco; Soprafina Gallery in Boston; Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, and the Charleston Heights Gallery in Las Vegas. He has been in countless group exhibitions. His work is in numerous important collections.
Among Gottsegenβs large scale Public Art Projects are: a series of twelve large windscreen glass panels for a light rail station in Denver, CO; the South Burlington, VT City Center Gateway; Public Art for Dartmouth Hitchcock Med Center; and the Vermont State Forensics Lab, a piece which combines Gottsegenβs painting, a public garden and outside glass installation. He is currently working on two public art pieces, one for Hyde Park, VT and the other for the Zampieri State Office Building in Burlington, VT.
Gottsegen has won many awards and fellowships. Recently he was the sole Artist in Residence in 2017 at the Cedar Key National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. He has been awarded a Vermont Arts Council Individual Creation Grant. He is an βofficial juriedβ artist of the Vermont Arts Council; won the University Teaching Excellence Award at UMASS/Lowell; was an Affiliate (resident) artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA; and was a Nevada Artist-in- Residence, as well as an artist-in- residence at the Ucross Foundation, and a recent artist residency at Stiwdio Maelor in Corris, Wales.
Gottsegen was Assoc Professor of painting at UMass/ Lowell, and taught for many years at California College of the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, achieving the rank of Full Professor. He has a BA from Brown University, and an MFA in Painting from California College of the Arts.
