Andrew Denman
“In the increasingly crowded field of wildlife artists, Andrew Denman stands out for his distinctive look in addition to his masterful painting skill” writes veteran art writer and magazine editor Jennifer King in a 2008 editorial for Create Better Paintings.com. Denman primarily paints wildlife and animal subjects in a unique, hallmark style combining hyper-realism with stylization and abstraction. His dynamic and original acrylic paintings can be found in museum collections on two continents and in numerous private collections in the USA and abroad. His clear voice, unique vision, and commitment to constant artistic experimentation have positioned him at the forefront of an artistic vanguard of the best contemporary wildlife and animal painters working today.
Denman holds a BA in Fine Arts from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CA. He is well known in the San Francisco Bay Area as both an artist and teacher, and he has gained international attention through major gallery showings, numerous museum exhibitions in the US and overseas, artist workshops and speaking engagements, and feature coverage in such publications as Southwest Art, Western Art Collector, International Artist, The Artist’s Magazine, American Artist, and Wildlife Art, among others.
Born in 1978, the Bay Area native showed a great degree of interest in art from an early age. Denman organized his first one man show in high school at a local library, and soon after began participating in exhibitions with Pacific Wildlife Galleries in Lafayette, CA, alongside leading figures Robert Bateman, Carl Brenders, and John Seerey-Lester. Andrew went on to hold four successful solo exhibitions at Pacific Wildlife before moving to Trailside Galleries in 2008. Denman is currently represented by Astoria Fine Art in Jackson, WY, Creighton Block Gallery in Big Sky, MT, Huey’s Fine Art in Santa Fe, NM, The Gallery at Sculpture by the Lakes in Dorset, England, Picture This in Alberta, Canada, and The Greenwich Workshop in Seymour, CT, which has produced limited edition giclée canvases of the artist’s work since 2011. The artist maintains Denman Studios at his Antioch, CA, home, which he shares with partner and fellow wildlife artist Guy Combes.
Denman’s work has toured nationally with the Andrew Denman: The Modern Wild, a solo retrospective curated and directed by Dr. David J. Wagner, the highly regarded Birds in Art exhibition, and the Society of Animal Artists, which has thrice honored Andrew’s work with Awards of Excellence. The artist is a regular participant in the highly competitive Western Visions Exhibition at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming, an institution that named him the Lanford Monroe Memorial Artist in Residence for Winter of 2009. Denman’s work can be found in the National Museum of Wildlife Art, The Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, AZ, the Nature in Art Museum, Gloucester, England, and numerous private collections around the world. The artist is a member of the Society of Animal Artists, NY, and The International Guild of Realism, AZ.
Whether painting an animal in its natural habitat or juxtaposing it against an abstract background, Denman goes to great lengths to faithfully portray his subjects, taking frequent field trips into wild places the world over, nature areas, parks, and zoos to observe his subjects and acquire reference material. Yet while accuracy is always of great importance, Denman is an artist before he is a naturalist. The sense of fearless experimentation and originality he brings to his paintings testifies to the artist’s true focus. As Mary Nelson writes in the Nov/Dec 2004 issue of Wildlife Art magazine, “In the end, it’s not the mood, the meaning, or the method that Denman craves. It is the medium-art.”