Finding—and Painting—the Drama in the Everyday

David Aipperspach
Assistant Professor of Art and Art History

David Aipperspach When you think of a dramatic image, a microwave oven may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Nor a flannelclad torso or a box fan. But for painter David Aipperspach, researching—and then identifying ways to represent— the dramatic relationships of light and shadow in everyday items is an important aspect of the art he creates.

“All the subjects … are recognizable to a broad audience. Yet as a body of work it’s interesting how these seemingly ubiquitous, everyday, or deadpan subjects can be imbued with ambiance, drama, and tension—which you might expect to see in a genre like science fiction—just by the way they are cropped, rendered, and lit,” he says.

Aipperspach is also interested in how time gets recorded in a painting. For his “Fan” series, he animated a box fan by taping streamers to it and turning it on. He then used a combination of models and photography to help understand some of the blurring effects and create the illusion of light and motion.

His newest work is inspired by a threeweek residency at the Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat in Laceyville, Pa. Each 7’ x 6’ painting in this series depicts a particular interior or exterior tableau recorded on site and is stamped with inset frames of various bands of color that mark the pocket of time represented. It was featured in a solo exhibition at Chart Gallery in New York City called Prologue to a garden dark.

“It’s like a clock; a way of recording time based on how the light changes as the sun sets.”