Daniel Sprick has cleared away the distractions. At 61, with his audience growing and his painting in its prime, he wants nothing in the way of his work. “No plants, no pets,” he says. He has moved from his longtime home in Glenwood Springs to a 16th-floor condo in Denver’s City Park: “No high maintenance.”
He paints there, daily, prolifically, concentrating on portraits these days, like the ones in his current exhibit at the Denver Art Museum.
The show is called “Fictions,” and the name serves as a reminder that his pieces, though hyper-realistic, are in fact, an artist’s interpretation of the facts. They look like photos at first, but the longer you stare — and you do — the more the brush strokes emerge, turning them, like their subjects, very human.
To be sure, Sprick is a precise painter. His work is deeply rooted in naturalism, technique. He says a portrait can take up to 80 hours, and you believe him. Each strand of hair is detailed, each wrinkle and blemish.
There’s a deep sensitivity in the portraits, a genuine respect for the way skin folds and ears bend. But there is brutal honesty, too. The pictures are flattering or they are not; it depends on the face and the particular moment captured.
“Certain friends and relatives have not been pleased,” he says, jokingly. People often think they look old. “Most of us have about a 20-year lag in the facts.”
So, he sticks to models mostly. People he picks because there is something about they way they look that he wants to capture. His subjects vary widely: young, aged, skinny, big, Asian, African-American, everything.
They might be smiling, like his joyful “Carmen;” dreamy, like “Ketsia;” shirtless, like dreadlocked “Jared.” “Tracey has her eyes closed; “Moses” stares at something off in the distance. “I see a sea of faces I want to paint,” he said.
Models sit for four hours or more, and then he finishes from a photograph, pulling a computer up next to his easel and working off the digital image.
You can see that in the pieces, too. They are luminous as if lit from behind. The paintings, and most are portraits at DAM, share a similar background, a bright off-white that Sprick makes by mixing just a touch of cadmium yellow into his white oil paint.
It democratizes his subjects — there’s no background with clues of social status or wealth or geography. There’s no symbolism waiting to be interpreted. If there’s a story behind these faces, the viewer supplies it, and that might be what holds people’s attention.
“They’re not trying to get it,” he said. “Because they are feeling it, naturally.”
The defining luminosity evokes other ages of painting. The great portraits of John Singer Sargent, perhaps, or Dutch realism, though Sprick’s people live in a contemporary multicultural world.
Sprick draws his own comparisons, and they span 500 years: The composition and tenor of 15th- century Netherlander painters Hieronymus Bosch and Hans Membling; the loose marks of late-Impressionist American Mary Cassatt, the 20th- century abstract expressionists, whose free style creeps into the edges of his canvases.
It all comes down to the mastery of brush and paint. Sprick’s work — he does still lifes in addition to portraits with a bit of surrealism thrown in — is organically appealing, which makes it serious and commercial at the same time. That means he’s been able to make a living as an artist (and not a teacher or a graphic designer or bartender, like most artists) and had a lifetime to hone his skills.
He started painting at 20 and “I’ve really done nothing else since,” he said.
He describes the time as “10 years of continuous hard, hard work” at the beginning, and says, “It took 20 years to do something remotely interesting.”
These days things come easier. He has the confidence that experience — and a show at a major museum, like DAM — brings. Though he knows his abilities to make the finest brush marks won’t last forever. The downside of spending your life developing your talent is that your life doesn’t last forever. And Daniel Sprick has a lot more things to paint.
“I’m jamming to get as much work done as possible,” he said. “For me it feels like an emergency. I have no time to lose.”
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
DANIEL SPRICK’S FICTIONS The Denver artist presents recent work at the Denver Art Museum. 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock. Through Nov. 2. $10 for Colorado residents. 720-865-5000 or denverartmuseum.com.
