Emerging artist Dana O'Regan is a sef-taught painter who combines his love of writing into his artworks. Dana was born in Ottawa and spend most of his life in New Brunswick including much time in Fredericton where he studied English, History and Classics at the University of New Brunswick. He started painting in 2001, splitting his time between his studio in Fredericton and Grand Manan.

Dana has exhibited his work in artist centres and in gallery spaces throughout New Brunswick since 2001 and received an Emerging Artist Grant from artsNB in 2002.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My art is inspired by my innermost experiences and interactions in this world and visions of a fictional world I have created. My paintings become the interface between those worlds. I will approach a painting many times before I feel it's complete. When I'm truly engaged in painting, I feel alive and in the moment. I love using palette knives and fan brushes to mix my colours both on and off the canvas and build the paint up in many textures. I also use washes and sponges to further enhance the texture of the paint, keeping what I like and burying the rest. While painting, I get ideas to write about my created world but it also seems that the writing influences my direction of painting. It is this relationship that I have between my painting and writing and how they influence each other that I explore in an ongoing series of paintings and texts called the Arcalogs.

The Arcalogs are meta-textual accounts, in the form of paintings, journals, poems and historical records, from the perspective of invented characters - Pascal Von Heinivin, Von Murk and the Editor Escapee. The Arcalogs depict the evolution of language, art and communication of a civilizations. My most recent group exhibition featured the "Red Series", a chapter of the Arcalogs. The Red Series paintings are from the point of view of the painter Von Murk and were inspired by poems of another character Von Heinivin. Each painting in this series is accompanied by a poem. The series that I am currently working on is called "Arcalogs: Backgrounds and Landscapes". This new series of paintings are inspired by historical texts, from the perspective of the Editor Escapee that frame the background and setting of the Arcalogs.