About
Davia DeNisco is a New York–based painter working in acrylic ink, watercolor, and gouache on heavy cotton paper. Her paintings are small and finely worked, moving between observed landscape (coastline, rural fields, constructed outdoor spaces) and abstraction drawn from remembered light and air. All of her exhibitions have been juried: twice at JAG Gallery, Key West, most recently in Poolside, 7th Annual, and in GALEX 59, Culture & Agriculture, and Teeny Tiny BOLD. Her work is held in private collections.
Artist statement
Everything I paint begins with a moment of pause, something easy to walk past that I stopped for instead. Some of those leave a picture behind: a field in early cold, the tiled edge of a pool, the red a beach umbrella throws down into its own shadow. Others leave a sensation: the heat before a thunderstorm, light coming through a porch screen, the ease of a mild overcast afternoon.
The first kind begins from a reference and sheds most of its detail. I crop, simplify, decide what to leave out. What I’m after isn’t the place itself but its residue: a shadow at its longest, light in the minutes before it goes. I build in transparent layers, letting color accumulate until the light feels like it’s coming from somewhere.
The second kind stays with me as a glow, a temperature, how long the light held. Those paintings keep it in that form. Both finish the same way: when the painting is carrying the feeling I made it for. More often now the two arrive together: an airport at night, a green channel light on the water, a lit window across the ice. A real place, at a real hour, kept as glow and duration rather than as a view.
I work small on purpose. A painting this size can catch you from across a room and then pull you closer. It’s that second part, where the layers and the shifts in color open up, that I make the work for.
For the exhibition record, see the one-page CV. For available works, visit Work, or get in touch.