Dave Martsolf

Dave Martsolf was born in 1949 in Kansas, moved to Western Pennsylvania in early childhood and at age 12 moved to New Hampshire where he resides today. Martsolf’s father and grandfather were architects and his mother a professional photographer. Martsolf attended MIT and later UNH where he earned a degree in Fine Arts. His early work was influenced by the great masters and others such as the post-impressionists Miro, Matisse, Kandinsky, Klee, Picasso, and the surrealist Salvador Dali. Architectural instincts developed due to his close association with architecture in his youth.

Dave’s focus has been in visual arts his entire life. His style extends from realism to surrealistic to fantasy and abstraction. His work uses the mediums of oils, watercolors, inks and pencils, to the more technically-oriented media of computer-based art. Beginning in the late 80’s Martsolf spent productive time with the tools of Bryce, Poser, Kai’s Power Tools, and similar photo editing and photo manipulation products. He was creator, owner and artistic director of Damsel Software Group in the 1990′s as a producer and manufacturer of original content screen savers.

Today, Dave has returned to handmade art. He continues to believe that art can be a vehicle to communicate visceral yet at the same time cerebral thoughts and feelings in a single still image. Envisioned and fashioned correctly in the surreal genre, these images can transport the observer to a dream reality totally absorbing and alive with all manner of doorways to emotions and experiences never before realized. His more recent abstracts present a more direct communication with the energy of the here and now, leaving the more philosophical constructs behind.

Dave is now adding to his watercolor collection, exploring in parallel his love of realism, abstraction, and surrealism. Grander conceptual surreal oils and large energetic abstracts are also underway again for the first time since the 1970’s and 80’s when all of his earlier surrealist pieces were created. Martsolf notes, “The computer has great power and abilities, but in the end what you get to hold in your hand is a print. There is something lost in that. I love to look at a piece that is a real one-off original. There is a unique one-on-one experience that happens when the piece is hand-made. As a painter I know how many hours are involved in making unique pieces. Computer art can also take many hours, but the result, a print, simply does not have the same life as a unique piece. Call it old fashioned if you will, but the skill to build a unique piece where infinite “Undo” commands are not available, now that is the stuff of legends.
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