Bio

I was born in California,
have lived in Oregon, Connecticut,
Illinois, Colorado, Florida, Texas, and Massachusetts.
I grew up in a sleepy beach town north of San Diego,

then cut my early teeth on Los Angeles and UCLA art school.

I have always drawn and painted.
I started painting at age 12 to have interesting stuff to hang on my walls.
I was not able to buy posters or frames, but I could draw and paint
and I could afford watercolor paper and dry paints and india ink.
I would start a painting on an afternoon
and paint until it was complete, usually far into the night.

After UCLA, I studied drawing and painting in an art
school with Larry Gluck, a painter who had settled in Los Angeles to teach.
I went back to basics, to line and form and tone and dimension.
I worked with oil paints in
underpainting and glazing, painting as drawing with a brush.
I learned to paint in classic renaissance style,
and from that worked to develop a language in paint and color
that would say what I needed to communicate.

I painted in oils until age 23. I stopped creating paintings for 21 years.

Through that 21 years I learned woodworking and cabinetry, carved benches and mantles,
soldered copper pipe together, doodled with table saw and pin nailer and glue,
building custom furniture and cabinets.
I drew plans and I learned architectural form and elements.

I took photographs of tracks in sawdust, and of
projects successfully brought to realization.
I learned to tint and mix colors and to work with lacquer.
I painted a set of lacquer doors and a bench with 21 coats of paint,
working to get to a perfection that satisfied me and would match what I
had described to the client. I scattered deep green lacquer dust through
that shop in such depth and quantity that I was still finding and vacuuming
it two years later. I learned 20 ways not to perfect a surface.
I learned spray and texture and paint consistency, all tools that I use today.
I learned perfection and craft.

All of this contributed to what I paint now.
A sense of space and form and function.
Balance, architectural sense, a feel for perspective in both drafting and photography.
I use photographic framing and distortion to draw the eye within the canvas.
I use airbrush to define primary color in the underpainting.

In 2003 I began painting again.
I painted in oils.
I learned airbrush and acrylic.
I rediscovered Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Camille Pizarro, Vincent Van Gogh,
Edward Hopper, David Hockney, Mark Rothko, Hans Hoffman and Wolf Kahn.
I found a language of line and symbol and color and texture
that started to say what I needed to say as an artist.
I found a language and a patterning of color and shape. I stopped using brushes
except for a rare definitive line and began painting with painting knives.

I am pretty sure
you have to be
able to paint
in a classic Renaissance methodology
before you are
allowed to go
abstract and contemporary…

But maybe that’s just me…

—spence munsinger

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