Dave Kwinter

 Dave was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of his life. He is a retired attorney who has two degrees in psychology. Dave has practiced law, been vice president of a bank, served in the Canadian military, delivered mail, worked underground as a miner, and, as lab assistant in a memory study, trained goldfish. Besides artmaking, Dave enjoys kayaking, nature photography, chess and playing the bagpipe.

After years of painting with acrylics and digital art software, I have discovered the delights of assemblage. Working in three dimensions is much more fun than being confined to two. The components of my sculptures come from thrift stores, flea markets, and eBay. More than once, something I picked up from the sidewalk has ended up in an art piece. Among the objects that I especially like are picture frames, kitchen implements, bird and animal carvings, children’s toys, jewelry, finials, tassels, doilies, and all sorts of hardware.

Most of the time, I begin an assemblage without a clear idea of where it is going; rather, I try to combine two items in an interesting way, search for a compatible third, and so on. To varying degrees, I favor symmetry in my art, but I also enjoy disrupting that symmetry. Some of my sculptures were inspired by coats of arms, and some by modern pinball machines, with their colorful, many-leveled complexity. Surrealism has always appealed to me, so I welcome ambiguities and incongruities when they appear. I agree with Francis Bacon that “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”

Among the assemblage artists whose works I admire are Max Ernst, H.C. Westermann, and Daniel Lind-Ramos.