David Syre is an American self-taught artist living and working in Tucson, AZ, and Bellingham, WA. Syre produces large-scale acrylic paintings, drawings, watercolors, and monumental art installations inspired by the subconscious, nature, and his travels. In recent years, Syre has exhibited in the US, Canada, Europe and South America.
Syre first started making art with his Swedish grandmother after battling polio at age 4, and, since then, has never stopped –even though he pursued a more traditional career in business development. All his life, art-making was a salvation and an urge to fulfill, and he found inspiration in spirituality that affected his life’s journey, both artistically and personally. Syre traveled the world studying forms of religion, spiritual practices, and Indigenous peoples and civilizations. He was captivated by the ancient wisdom of nature he found at the core of these cultures. Nature, these Indigenous cultures, and the primordial connection between them and the land became one of the biggest influences on his art. Inspirations originating from Syre’s meditative practices, in the end, translate to an ever-evolving, sophisticated, and prolific body of work.
Over the years, Syre developed and mastered this unique voice cultivated with experimentation, spontaneity, and an innate ability to grasp new techniques and adapt to new mediums. His technique often involves bold, fast-paced lines and brushstrokes, and an intricate, multi-layered composition of vivid colors. Especially visible in his large-scale paintings, Syre’s expression of the world around him is energetic and stylistic, involving thick applications of color with various methods such as dripping and lining. Syre’s artistic process is, in many ways, both ritualistic and mindful of the moment: His watercolors explore a more meditative, calculated process of painterly composition, but his expression stays similarly bold.
For his signature style of drawings on black paper Syre uses a form of quick and powerful gestures similar to his acrylic paintings, referencing a recurring set of themes throughout, such as the universe, landscapes and architecture, tribute to the land, and totems. Critic Peter Frank writes, “In Paul Klee’s terms, Syre ‘goes for a walk with a line’ in each drawing,” and continues: “The method and format are constant […] but the nature of the imagery flips back and forth between the referential, the rhapsodic (taking off from a hinted reference), and the purely fanciful.”
Gaining recognition later in life, Syre has exhibited in various galleries, art fairs, and public spaces throughout his career, including New York, NY; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Nice, France; Hamburg, Germany;Copenhagen, Denmark; Santa Fe, New Mexico, Vancouver, B.C. and Miami, FL. A monograph of his works on paper, The Black Book of Drawings, was published in 2022 by SARAHCROWN New York with essays by critics Jessica Holmes and Peter Frank.
Syre is working on several interdisciplinary projects, including several large-scale sculptures and installations in the public realm, such as The Peace Trail Project: a longitudinal land art project in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. He completed a significant sculptural work for the Peace Arch Historical Park in Blaine, WA, in 2022.
