David Scott McCurry is an American artist currently living in Greenville, South Carolina. He works in traditional mediums, found object assemblage, and stone carving. His life and work experience extends to the African continent where he lived in The Gambia (1980-83), Malawi (1988-91) and Namibia (1995-98).

David studied painting and drawing with Miguel Angel Argüello at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Miguel was a student of Spanish Realist master Antonio López García and the work of these contemporary figurative realists influenced David’s artwork greatly. David has also studied painting with American artists Phillip Garrett and Michael Brodeur and painting and stone sculpture with African artists Kay Chiromo and Berlings Kaunda in Malawi.

His work builds an autobiographical narrative of place and history, often focused on architectural and natural subjects in the many locations of his life/work. His painting is informed by the science of visual sensory perception and holonomic brain theory. David’s professional life as an academic, working with ethnographic methods in social science has also influenced his vision and natural affinity with human history, found objects as artifacts, and landscapes, both urban and rural. 

Artist statement

I do not call my work “plein air,” after the traditional, mostly impressionst methods used in much contemporary plein air painting. “Painting from nature” is another closely related but not precise term for what I do. I work through direct observational realism, a phrase that my friend and fellow artist Karl Warma says “does not exactly roll off the tongue”. Whatever it is, I sit with my subject matter in view, often outdoors, and build a conversation with visual elements and place over long and repeated stretches of time. Many of my location paintings can take several weeks or months to complete. This “long exposure” method (longitudinal realism?), to borrow the photographic term and instilled in me by my first teacher Miguel Arguello who was an important Spanish Realist, continually delights me and challenges my work. For the viewer, the resulting work invites you to also look long and hard, prompting contemplative reflection and challenging our modern perceptions built on superficiality, dimensional deficit, and immediacy.

I have been variously influenced by an eclectic list of artists whose work I admire; Canaletto, Albert Bierdstadt, Andrew Wyeth, Jasper Johns, Ben Aronson, and recently I’ve been looking long and hard at the work of Rackstraw Downes whose process and methods resonate with my own.

David Scott McCurry © 1998 – 2023