DCA Fine Art

On a walk with Skip I stopped beside a large colony of thistle, the spine-covered, invasive pest overtaking much of the West. In the Teton Valley orders stand to kill it on sight, so unwelcome is its presence. However, it possesses a bright fuchsia bloom, dramatic and distracting, atop its lethal stem. Skip, the four mutts, this much-vilified plant, and myself stood around in silence as I considered terminating the tough invader with an old rake handle. I came around to taking pictures of it instead....

David Newsom, 10.17.05

Excerpted from Skip

David Newsom is a Los Angeles based artist with a degree in filmmaking from Ithaca College. While at Ithaca, he was taken with the snap shot aesthetic mastered by such photographers as Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Nan Goldin. Over the last 10 years, his work has moved from the straight image to a more lyrical aesthetic, inspired by the writing of Swedenborg, Jung and Joseph Campbell, and enabled largely by his discovery of archival digital printmaking.

Moved by the regional power and mysterious worlds of great printmakers like Keith Carter, Sally Mann, Roy DeCarava and many others, Newsom began working to unearth his own visual lexicon. Using richly saturated colors and sometimes idiosyncratic, plastic cameras, Newsom's current work attempts to tell a highly subjective, more painterly story about his given subject. SKIP, published in December of 2005, is a combination of straight images and highly affected Holga camera images that together create a kind of visual poem about his family's life in Southeast Idaho.

He has exhibited work in galleries throughout California and the US, and his book, SKIP, was recently profiled in the prestigious PhotoEye Bookstore as an Editor's Choice, Winter 2006. Images from the book are the highlight of Newsomï's Summer 2007 solo show at DCA 3 Miles of Idaho.

In addition, Newsom is well-known as a film/television actor and producer, teaming with his girlfriend Sian Heder on the award-winning short, Mother, and their upcoming feature, Tallulah.