Dan Grew up in Central Pennsylvania, near the Susquehanna River ,and always within a short walk to the nearby woods he loved. He was a dreamer who knew his destiny was to be an artist even though he was told repeatedly he had no talent, so with no formal art education, Dan hoped to acquire experiences he could ultimately use in his paintings somehow, so he worked in a variety of jobs, but the one that started to give him the tools he would need to paint came from working in the display department of a small department store in Williamsport.
Then about a tyear later he was hired to be the display director, actually the whole display department for one of a chain of department stores in Rochester NY; where he worked for five years, followed by several more years of being a free lance display designer for specialty shops in the area. During those years he cultivated his instinct for two and three dimensional design but most important, the experience allowed him to acquire and hone his ability to think originally.
In 1962, Dan started to paint and became active in the Rochester art community, where soon he became known for his landscapes, figurative paintings and his portraits. In 1970 while painting a portrait, his subject told him about the art colony on Jackson Square and urged him to look into it as the artists there were well known for their excellence. So the first week of 1971 he took a bus there, and found it was an ideal place to paint and market his results among them. Although he has made occasional forays to other places since then to paint portraits, Dan has long been a well recognized fixture in the New Orleans art community. In 2001 he was selected to be the first to have a one man show, and the second to have an artist in residency at the Degas House. Edgar Degas, the French Impressionist was the first. Of course the paintings Dan displayed were the Treehouse Collection.
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He continued to paint portraits to support himself while developing Treehouse at every opportunity. Then he joined the artist’s co op in the Dutch Alley Gallery just one week before Katrina struck. Most of his possessions were destroyed or damaged by the storm including all of his portrait samples. Fortunately just before he went to The Super Dome where he sought shelter from the storm, he had stuck his Treehouse Collection in corners of his studio where he hoped they would be safe, and miraculously they survived without any damage. As soon as possible, he returned to re-start his life here in New Orleans, and continued to develop and start marketing the Treehouse Collection through his membership in the Gallery where you can still find a few of his originals and a complete selection of his Giclee reproductions. |
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