david colombo

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Paul Cézanne observed that "everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder." I've taken that statement to heart in my own work, which is all about describing forms – those same spheres, cones, and cylinders – in an imaginary space. I think of the figures as small sculptures, and I freely change them and move them around, experimenting with color and form. In complex [landscape] compositions...the shapes are arranged on a kind of tabletop. I use a simle horizon line to imple a landscape.

Lately, my focus has moved to printmaking. One subject has been the fossils from Canada's Burgess Shale – 500-million-year-old animals that developed strange, segmented bodies with five eyes, spiked limbs, and elephant-like noses, as if taken from a Picasso painting. I've also drawn inspirtation from my work as an art conservator specializzing in antique gloves. These beautiful objects, made of intaglio-printed paper cut and pasted onto spheres, were built in pairs, one terrestrial and one celestial. In antique maps and globes, the cartographer would try and show land or objects from above at an angle simultaneously, creating the same type of imaginary space I aim for in my work.

David Colombo received his BFA from Tufts University and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts for his MFA. David currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.