Portfolio: David Hornung

by Lynn Woods, July 27, 2009

David Hornung’s oil and gouache paintings bear a kinship to comics, Japanese and Chinese woodcuts, Indian miniatures, and American folk art. The small-scale works are disarming in their spare, rustic iconography, set in elemental landscapes that frame cosmological phenomena—a dark cloud emitting light rays, atmospheric shifts, a starburst on the horizon—like abstracted stage sets. Each painting has the force of epiphany, yet there is nothing overwrought in these deadpan representations. Rather, it’s the odd combination of different visual languages that cause the shock and surprise, the depiction of impossible occurrences we can yet believe in. The juxtaposition of the diagrammatic with the atmospheric, the literal with the abstract, the cartoonlike with the naturalistic creates ambiguities in scale, space, and time that seem knowable, true to our mental experience. His paintings are inscrutable, yet they have a dreamlike logic, a psychological poignancy.

Hornung paints in a studio on a wooded hillside in Shokan, not far from the garden and house he shares with his wife, cellist Abby Newton. The sphere of his influence extends far beyond this reclusive setting, however. He is a dedicated teacher and talented author whose book, Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers (McGraw-Hill, 2004), is available in five languages. Earning his MFA from the University of Wisconsin in 1976, Hornung has taught art for more than 30 years and is currently associate professor and chair of the art and art history department at Adelphi University, commuting from an Upper West Side apartment during the school year.

Hornung was a reviewer for ARTnews and has published many essays on art. He has lectured all over the country on art, color, and quilts (in an earlier phase of his career, he constructed art quilts). Recently, he collaborated with poet Susan Sindall on a collection of her poems called Corona, contributing his white-on-black drawings. His paintings can be seen in his one-man show at John Davis Gallery, in Hudson, which runs through August 16. Portfolio: www.johndavisgallery.com.