An inheritor of pictorial tradition that goes back at least as far as ancient Rome and later compelled the best efforts of such Northern European masters as Roger van de Weyden and Jan Vermeer, Sprick finds much yet to be revealed in the still life and the interior. His ultra realistic oil paintings continue and expand old dialogues about appearance and reality, the relationship of art and life, the revelation of the multiples in the simple. Although he is a man who is devoted to the meticulous representation of everyday things, Daniel Sprick’s career as a painter began with visions of flight.
“I began drawing,” Daniel Sprick explains, “at age four. Dad showed me how.” Airplanes were a passion. The youngster associated their graceful contours with movement and eventually made elegance in drawing the equivalent of flight. Balsa wood gliders, looping and banking, focused Sprick’s imagination on the beauty of line. To this day, Sprick relates an “exquisite line” to being airborne. Each painting, he says, is his search for “just the right launch,” and exercise that must conclude in a perfect landing.
Tensions between interior and exterior, tradition and experiment, distance and intimacy, charm and weirdness, and literal representation and emotional expression fill Daniel Sprick’s paintings. Viewed through this works, the artist’s world is a small one—studio, hallway, a studio table, a window—yet it encompasses a kind of cosmic vision. “I didn’t know you could be a professional artist until I was in my mid-twenties,” Sprick recalls. “I thought it was too late for me.”
Looking at the next realistic oil paintings, what we can say, is just: “no, wasn’t too late for him”.
