I’m Dave Ashby, a California-born artist based in Salt Lake City, Utah; I’ve painted under the pseudonym Dashby since 2014. Art has been a lifelong passion and pursuit and I was classically trained at NYU School of Law. Living in Northern California, New York City, Montreal, Florida, and the American Intermountain West and Southwest inspires and influences my aesthetic. In the last decade, I have focused almost exclusively on larger scale acrylic and mixed media abstract expressionist and quasi-representational paintings. I find the larger size creates an intimate space for individual emotional resonance with a work.

Themes in my work include spiritual yearning and connection with the divine; journeys of loss and resilience, transformation and growth; nature and the individual in the modern age; evocative visual ambiguity and the space between abstraction and representation; memento mori and the impermanence of things as beautiful truths required to live authentically; and abstract minimalism and maximalism.

My process involves creating a loosely structured design outline around an idea or feeling that guides but does not constrain the final work. I then paint spontaneously, often gesturally or intuitively, channeling that feeling. Then I set the painting aside.

Over weeks and sometimes months, I revisit the piece, sit and listen to it, and then set it aside again. In time, the work tells me it’s complete or where it wants to go next. Some paintings never get another brushstroke; they emerge fully formed and expressed. Others gradually reveal themselves and their depths. A finished work feels as if it has always existed exactly in that form.

I constantly work to keep the viewer present with the painting as a physical object that another human crafted and imbued with meaning, not just a visual experience or something imitated by AI. Techniques I use include: preserving layers of “mistakes” and corrections, impasto, tears in canvas, subtle and extreme color shifts and patterns, finger and hand prints, painting on framed canvases, emphasis of the underlying frame and supports, among others.