The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
Bio
Dana Saulnier lives on a few acres of rural land where he tries to keep his senses alert to the fragile rhythms of time and form. Saulnier’s painting practice is historically self conscious, aligning with traditions of the figure in landscape. Saulnier received the BFA degree in Painting from the University of Cincinnati and the MFA degree in Painting from Cornell University. He is Professor Emeritus of Art at Miami University, in Oxford, OH, where he taught painting, drawing, and theory, also serving as the Graduate Director of the MFA Program for ten years. Saulnier has exhibited his work nationally and internationally in over one hundred exhibitions including more than thirty solo exhibitions. His work is held in public collections in the mid-west and corporate collections throughout the United States. Saulnier has been recognized with competitive grants, awards, and residencies including from the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Foundation, Provincetown Art Museum in Provincetown, MA. His work has garnered reviews in Art Papers, The Wall Street Journal, and on the Hyperallergic site. Dana Saulnier is affiliated with First Street Gallery, New York, and Cynthia Byrnes Contemporary Art, Westport, CT.
Artist Statement
The subject of the figure in landscape is a repeating project in history. There is so much we never get right. Forms in these works may achieve temporary integrity. Though they must twist, pivot, rise, and fall, they also have mass and weight. They retain a grounded carnal presence. They evolve to survive.
There are meetings and encounters in these images, but they are multiple and difficult to describe. There are encounters with art. Gestural abstraction traverses a distant, lost spiritual ethos we may imagine in renaissance and baroque art. At the same time the paintings gather up my life as it is lived here and now, witness to the light we share, witness to our personal and collective precarity. And the paintings often gather up my life as it is shared with persons close to me, trials, pleasures, anxieties, love, all the temporary shelters we build together. A life spent painting means continually finding one’s life strange and new – distant and immediate. The distance seems necessary and may be painting’s most productive gift. The images must find the right distance from habit and category to make better sense of life as it moves through and beyond us.
I come to think of the works as compressed encounters that refuse conclusions, to seek, most of all, to keep happening.
Portfolio
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