Dana Blume (b.1993) is an American painter based in Seattle, Washington. He earned his BFA in drawing and painting from California State University Long Beach in 2019 and his MFA in the same discipline from university of Washington in 2023. His work depicts a world where personal and collective anxieties, hopes and dreams are personified through humanoid creatures and awkward bodily forms.
"Don’t ask Dana Blume what the blue monster means; he doesn’t know.
At a moment when figuration has reached a fever pitch of rote decorative decadence, Blume comes bearing a heap of delicious confusion in the shape of the subliminal weird. Sun-kissed slugs, humanoid houses, and quizzical azure beasts with talon like nails are among a rotating cast of characters that appear throughout you are so wonderful, a world populated with the utterly equivocal.
Smeared meaning is also present in Blume’s style, defined by a fluidity of marks that result in kaleidoscopic scenes that ripple, shimmer, and shift softly, at times appearing as though viewed through the shallows of a pool or a gel-smeared lens. like a Rorschach test, Blume’s paintings lure the viewer to superimpose their interior world across each scene, in the process imbuing gripped pistols and stolen apple pies with personal freudian slips and twists (that will vary from one viewer to the next).
The impulse to tease out the subliminal stems from Blume’s fascination with pareidolia, the phenomenon that makes humans imagine patterns and images in everything. In the same way children see rabbits in a cloud or the devout see christ in a slice of toast, Blume invites us to locate our inner fears and loves and selves within a landscape undulating with unctuous schmears of paint, to get curious about what lurks within the image of a gentle blue giant with all its jocular, slacker, sasquatch energy…who also packs a gun and definitely has a dark side. good or bad? nothing’s ever that black or white in the world Blume has built. It is, however, something undeniably wonderful."
- Amanda Manitach, Public Display Art
Opens Thursday 11th September 2025 6-8pm