Greenville artist David Sloan is one of the most undiscovered modern oil painters I have come across. He works out of his studio located at the Art bomb at the west end of Greenville, SC. Sloan is a graduate of Anderson University and has a degree in fine painting and ceramics. He currently balances his time between his job as a Senior Designer at Erwin Penland marketing firm in Greenville, painting on nights and weekends in his studio, and spending time with his wife whom is currently pursuing a MFA at Clemson University.

Sloan’s style is quite complex because he uses a baroque patterned background juxtaposed to a painterly figure in the foreground. His style is very reminiscent of that of Francis Bacon, yet Sloan’s juxtaposition of baroque background with loosely painted figures moves beyond a purely expressionistic work and creates a new genre of painting I have yet to see in any other painters’s work. He has a remarkable knack of layering brushstrokes, splattering just the right amounts of paint on the canvas, which give so much life and movement to his subjects. When you study a Sloan Painting up close, you will notice the small details and nuances such as running paint and a small amount of bright under painting which grabs the viewer’s eye.

In the Sloan painting I have in my own collection, Sloan leaves a line of bright red under painting behind the subjects head which creates a hard edge against the background and effectively causes the viewers eye to move in the direction of subjects own movement. The subjects face is blurred just enough to create a sense of impersonality and mystery which draws the viewer in to discover just what emotion and feeling the subject is experiencing.

You can view more of David Sloan’s work at: http://davidslone.carbonmade.com/