Dana Oldfather

Dana Oldfather is a painter who has exhibited in galleries and museums including Library Street Collective, Detroit, Zg Gallery, Chicago, Kathryn Markel Fine Art, New York, Red Arrow Gallery, Nashville, Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, moCa Cleveland, and The University of Southern Queensland, in Australia. She was awarded the William and Dorothy Yeck Award for Young Painters, two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, a Satellite Fund Emergency Relief Grant from SPACES Gallery, The Warhol Foundation, and The Cleveland Foundation, and was a 2019 finalist for the Hopper Prize. Oldfather has been published in New American Paintings, Beautiful/Decay, and ArtMaze Magazine among others. Her paintings are found in many public and corporate collections in the US including MGM International, Bedrock Detroit, The Putnam Collection for Case Western Reserve University, The Cleveland Clinic, and the Progressive Art Collection. Dana Oldfather works and lives just outside Cleveland, Ohio with her husband Randall and son Arlo.

I’ve always felt a little off-balance and untethered, like the ground is falling or a breeze could pick me up. The world is moving too fast. I am overwhelmed, jumpy.  Perhaps we should give more weight to our actions, no matter how small? The whole of our lives is built of innumerable events, one succeeding another, obtusely influencing the next. In a world full of unknowns, change and impermanence are our only certainties. If I could come to terms with this, would my fear subside?

I communicate the dilemma of being through landscape. I bring my insides to bear on the outside and trepidation colors the scene. The atmosphere is thick, and the landscape psychedelically tinted like dawn, an eclipse, or a summer storm. Flora becomes bulbous and fleshy, petal-like and feathery in the waning light. Eerie glows float in the air or emanate from craggy terrain.  Reality is not what it seems. While building other worlds, the sense of my impermanence in a mysterious universe stretches out into broader context and I am free, expansive. I describe the moment just before a reckoning or upheaval; the moment before fate takes hold and changes everything.