Sean Oswald is an observational painter in the alla prima tradition. He is a professor of drawing, painting, and art history at UMHB and lives in Central Texas with his wife and three children.
Statement
The practice of painting and drawing for me is partially about quietly and thoughtfully engaging with a subject, content, material, and myself. I think that an individual’s perspective and voice is extremely important and somehow my acts of creativity are a performance of that. This can be seen in my work when I choose to flatten space, or mess with perspective, or to paint something differently then I perceived it. Sometimes a gesture can be a work of imagination or intuition, and sometimes it is a response to what I am looking at.
I love authenticity and confidence in artwork and I try to have these in mind as I create. These things manifest as bold colors, and expressive or gestural marks. I seek to tell things poetically and beautifully. The question that has been challenging me lately is, “is this good, true, and beautiful?”