David Larned’s interview with Dilwyne Designs

“Since I started my blog, David Larned has been one of the people I wanted to interview most. Dave and I finally connected recently and spent a few hours at his home in Pennsylvania talking about everything from his life as a painter, his obsession with doing work on his property on his tractor to his new found love for the tradition of hunting…” Read the entire article here

Peter Trippi
Editor, Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine

“In an era when many artists ignore the past’s lessons to their own detriment, it is a rare pleasure to encounter the portraits of David Larned. Those who prioritize novelty may hear this as damning praise. If so, they should listen again. The finest creations of such portraitists as Rubens, van Dyck, Velázquez, Sargent, Degas, Kinstler, and Shanks enrich us not only by putting a face on history and adorning museums, but also by revealing their secrets to men and women making art today. Consulted judiciously, these masters live on by helping later artists to find their own voices, to depict their own contemporaries effectively. Re-animating the past for its own sake constitutes a dead end, however, and works created in that mode can be spotted a mile away.

When you see a portrait by David Larned, expect to be caught off guard. The haircut, clothing, and accessories suggest the sitter walks among us, yet there is something ineffably timeless in both the treatment and the spirit. It’s clear that Larned mastered the requisite technical skills (color, lighting, draftsmanship, brushwork) while training in Philadelphia and Florence, and also that he came to love and feel the exemplars his teachers set before him. Within the arena of painting full or partial figures on canvas in oil, there are only so many ways to proceed, but somehow Larned orchestrates and re-orchestrates only the parts essential to conveying his sitters’ distinct personae.

These portraits have no standard look; each has been composed and executed elegantly and simply, in direct response to the sitter’s individuality. Immediacy is assured, yet the camera does not reign here: sitters’ palpability is the result of serious looking at how opportunities can be maximized and problems solved, and of slipping behind the façade every human being initially presents to another.

If the hallmark of the professional is making hard work look easy, this is professionalism of a very high order. This is also artistry that should ultimately find its place in the long tradition of great portraiture, because somehow these pictures look as if they were always meant to be.”

Meredith J. Long
Meredith Long Gallery, Houston, Texas

“David not only delivers a fantastic likeness of his subject, but also you have the feeling that he has somehow touched their soul.”

Jamie Wyeth
Artist

“David Larned is one of the most inspired and talented portrait painters working today. With a Larned portrait one sees not only a remarkable likeness – but, more importantly an impressive work of art.”

James H. Duff
Director, Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford PA

“David Larned’s art demands and deserves a very long look. It will be studied and enjoyed for decades to come, both as part of – and as a representation of – this region, its people and its culture. His fine and carefully wrought painting is now clearly part of our aesthetic heritage.”

Tony Devaney Morinelli Ph.D.
Humanities Chair
Director of Performing Arts
The Shipley School
Bryn Mawr, PA

“Larned reaches beyond the canvas with intimate touch. The trusting innocence of a child; the furrowed experience of the mature, the vigorous promise of the young: his brush seizes tangible vitality with simple honesty. Look too at the canvas surface. Here we find the beauty of painting as painting. Suddenly, yet subtly, rich colors immerse us. Dense and creamy hues stir our delight. Gentle and delicate transitions illuminate the form in a beckoning and delicate warmth. We see them with a sure knowledge: tangible, moving, alive.”

Halsey Spruance
Executive Director
Delaware Museum of Natural History, Wilmington DE

“The eyes on a Larned canvas meet the viewer to reveal a distinct persona and a divinely created soul. Those eyes, they are the handshake, the embrace, the greeting, the invitation to know the model.

Clearly, Larned’s works evolve from a passion for painting, innate skill, and finely honed technique that emphatically demonstrate the power of portraiture.”

Robert C. Jackson
Artist

“In meeting David you are struck by his authenticity, intensity, and intuition which are all traits one would want from a portrait artist. Good art is truthful and real and his paintings push beyond mere likeness to include all these necessary elements. In so much of David’s artwork you notice a spark between the sitter and the artist where he has captured an individual and it appears for a moment they have forgotten they were posing for a portrait. It is in that awareness of the spark where David’s characteristics bring the portrait to it’s full potential.”

Andrew C. Rose
Art Finance Partners, LLC
New York City, NY

“The challenge which faces every portrait painter is the ability to accurately and recognizably depict his subjects not only as they are, but also as they aspire to be. Graced with enormous natural talent, David Larned captures the character and soul in his portraits of people, which is indeed the essence of a memorable and timeless work of art.”

Douglas Hyland
Director, New Britain Museum of American Art
New Britain, CT

“Having studied David Larned’s portraits in an exhibition I became aware of his sensitive fusion of the real and the ethereal. His likenesses have a spiritual, almost mystical quality, and yet if you actually know any of his subjects, as I do, you recognize them instantly. As an art historian, I would equate Larned’s achievement as the method by which he reveals the personality of his sitters, a feat seldom achieved. I am reminded also of the timelessness of Johannes Vermeer, whose figured studies are similarly caught in a moment of time, for which we are eternally grateful.”

John Pence
John Pence Gallery, San Francisco

“A portrait is a representation of the likeness, personality and/or character of an individual or group of individuals. The creator must possess an array of talents to carry off the portrait successfully. David Larned is that rare, sophisticated, erudite observer and painter who succeeds at this task as very few do. He succeeds in recording the physical and mental aspects of his subject (s) with clarity; his portraits breathe life into his subject with authority and panache. At so young an age, he is a top flight portraitist with few equals.”

Dr. Gregory S. Hedberg
Director, European Paintings & Sculpture
Hirschl and Adler Galleries, NYC

“Portraiture is a wonderful way to slowly get back to the artist patron relationship that has become so ripped apart over the past century. Art collectors now only buy art “off the rack” so to speak. Commissioning a portrait from a painter, like commissioning a building from an architect, is a wonderful way for art lovers and artists to become connected and to inspire one another.”

“Up until Dutch artists started to paint landscapes and still lives “on spec,” virtually all great art was commissioned. Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rubens all had their patrons who commissioned specific works of art. This artist/patron relationship did not inhibit, but sparked creativity.”

Ryan Grover
Curator, Biggs Museum of American Art, Dover DE

“All of Larned’s portraits share certain qualities: a baroque richness of color, unique and telling gestures and a brushstroke that imbues his subjects with an inner movement. These are not paintings of hurdling athletes but of sitters who vibrate with their own personalities.”

Mark Dance
Artist

“David’s portraits are intimate letters to the sitters. Viewing them is akin to reading someone’s diary. Each page is an investment of spirit and a wealth of honesty… the brushstrokes and descriptive passages combine to illuminate the sitter’s life, their surroundings, their emotion.”

Dave Hickey
Writer, Curator, and Cultural Critic
Las Vegas

– Excerpt from Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery ‘06 Portrait Competition Catalog

… particularly apt are David Larned’s portraits rendered in a manner that self-consciously recalls the manner of John Singer Sargent. Their historical allusion to a traditional manner of American portraiture, far from seeming derivative, actually locates, valorizes, and somehow enhances the aura of the sitters. The style seems bestowed as a kind of gift upon its anonymous subjects, as if the artists were acknowledging that their subjects are worthy of the high manner of American portraiture.

Karol A. Schmiegel
Director Emerita
Biggs Museum of American Art

“David Larned continues a tradition of portrait painting begun in the Renaissance and refined over the centuries by masters such as Titian, Rembrandt, Velazquez, and Sargent. What began as the capture of a painted likeness developed into an illuminating character study of the individual. The personality of the sitter, perhaps an important emotion, the accoutrements of profession, and a descriptive setting were often primary components. The painted portrait functioned as a memorial, or a record for the family, church, government, or institution, as well as a work of art.

The State of Delaware commissioned David to paint portraits of the First Ladies who lived at Woodburn, the Governor’s residence in Dover. The special challenge was to depict them as they were when their husbands were in office — and for several that time was over twenty years ago! As one person who has known all the women commented, “He has truly captured the person on canvas. I can see the lady I know. They are very different people, and that is obvious. These are not the usual stiff, formalized official portraits. I feel that I could have a conversation with First Lady Mrs. Wolf.”

David has limited his palette in each work to a few key colors, often one warm and the other cool. This practice plus his frequently simple, neutral backgrounds and dynamic lighting heightens the subject’s appearance. The textures of clothing are amazingly naturalistic. The overall effect is one of quiet drama, the viewer’s expectation that a conversation with the sitter can begin.

Larned’s work is especially significant in his continuation of the historic portrait tradition with a technique that stands on the shoulders of the “old masters” but is not limited to it. His sitters are decidedly of today, yet his response to them transcends a particular style or time. These are straightforward, naturalistic images that eloquently affirm the beauty of our visible world.”