Painter’s mountain and coastal scenes are the work of intense absorption
The standard job description for a landscape painter involves close observation, trial sketching, perhaps a photograph or two, before brush ever touches canvas. None of that applies to Asheville painter David V. Eckert.
“I usually get something in my head and then just start painting,” Eckert says of his growing body of landscapes and seascapes — works created with a remarkable spontaneity despite the detail and emotional weight each work carries. “All of my paintings are based on a memory or a feeling.”
It begins with the sky, which dominates nearly all of his work on canvas. Sometimes calm and soothing in grays and blues, at other times more ominous in a deeper and darker palette, an Eckert sky begins the conversation with other subject matter often placed low in the frame below it — a lonely house set off by itself in a corner of a marshy landscape, the serrated line of the Blue Ridge, or a lone umbrella on a beach. “The sky sets the tone for the rest of the painting,” Eckert says. “Working with acrylics, this process goes very fast and without any preconceived notion of how it will end up.”
An intense creativity was apparent early on in Eckert’s artistic growth, as far back as his Michigan childhood in a family that, while not inherently artistically inclined, appreciated his creative instincts. “I often preferred a cardboard box to any toy,” Eckert remembers. A future as an architect seemed possible after Eckert won a state-wide architectural competition in high school and the offer of a college scholarship, but the math involved in architectural drawing was problematic for him and put an end to that career path. Still, his paintings reveal an architect’s careful attention to form and detail, recalling Edward Hopper in their precision underlaid with a strong emotional texture.
A degree in hospitality services and business management brought a peripatetic professional life, including managing elite spas in California, Connecticut, and Kentucky and, later, his husband’s psychiatry practice on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. But all during those years, Eckert kept a brush handy for working on murals and signs in his off hours. On the Cape, amid Provincetown’s lively arts community, he took painting classes with the contemporary painter and instructor Mary Kass (1930-2009), who gave Eckert access to her personal art collection that included works by Matisse and Picasso. It was the move to Asheville seven years ago that, with the encouragement of his husband, inspired Eckert to take up professional painting full time.
When not capturing natural moments inspired by the rugged Blue Ridge, he paints the dreamy light of South Carolina’s humid, languorous Lowcountry, where he frequently visits. “Driving in the Lowcountry is like being inside a painting,” he says of his love of the tidal marshes, blackwater creeks, beaches, and other coastal scenes that draw him there.
The bold colors and quick drying time for which acrylics are noted are perfectly suited to Eckert’s fluid work style, changing and adapting like the light he captures on canvas. “I feel acrylics are a better fit with my personality and are better suited to how I work,” he says. “I’ve been working recently on two paintings at a time. I find it keeps the process fresh to step away from one for a while and turn to the other.” He may be creating a seascape with crashing surf on one easel and a wooded mountain landscape on another, easily shifting between them. Such intense focus reflects a positive and fruitful embrace of the ADHD with which he was diagnosed some years ago. “Creativity, spontaneity, and being able to hyper-focus on a passion all inform my painting,” he says. “I experience [ADHD] as a positive.”
Eckert’s work has found its way into collections as far away as eastern Europe; and this past summer, Wofford College’s Richardson Center for the Arts mounted a one-man show, titled Essence of a Moment, neatly capturing in four words the catalyst at the heart of Eckert’s prolific creativity.
“I generally paint five or six hours a day, seven days a week,” he says. “I often lose track of time. I’m drawn to the essence of a moment in nature, never the same, always changing.”
David V. Eckert, Asheville. Eckert’s studio is housed at Marquee, 36 Foundy St. in the River Arts District (marqueeasheville.com). See davidveckert.com, call 502-548-0882, or e-mail eckertd18@yahoo.com for more information.