New Works in Wood by Danville Chadbourne

Danville Chadbourne, born in Bryan, Texas in 1949, earned his BFA in 1971 from Sam Houston State University and his MFA in 1973 from Texas Tech University. After teaching studio art and art history at the college level for 17 years, Chadbourne left academia in 1989 to dedicate himself fully to his art. He has exhibited extensively at both state and national levels, including more than 100 solo exhibitions. His work is part of numerous private and public collections. His international residencies include ArtSpace India in Calcutta and Atelierhaus Hilmsen in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. Chadbourne has received the Dozier Travel Grant and the prestigious Individual Artist Support Grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation in both 2019 and 2023.

Primarily a sculptor in clay and wood, Chadbourne works in a range of materials and in both two- and three-dimensional formats. Over the years he has created a complex body of work unified by a primal iconography and an artifact-like quality that emerges from a very personal and consistent formal, aesthetic and philosophical sense. He has lived in San Antonio, Texas since 1979.

Statement from the Artist:

“Essentially, my work is concerned with the evocation of spiritual or primal states. I use simple organic forms, often in suggestive conjunctions that elaborate on metaphorically primary issues of ambiguity, morality, accident/intention, contradiction or even existence. Frequently there is an allusion to circumstance, ritual or contextual usage, and time as a condition of the work, but it appears in a peripheral, indirect, or generalized way, never specific or obvious. I have chosen by personal evolution to use forms and images that appear to be part of some culture with an elaborate mythological structure, never quite defined, but evidently interrelated. I am concerned with the intellectual speculation that we make regarding other cultures, especially primitive or ancient ones based on our observation of their artifacts. This anthropological perception is a key issue in my work.

Formally, I use relatively simple sculptural images, sometimes static, like monuments, other times active, dynamic forms that suggest some usage, often ritualistic. I also tend to use materials and processes that imply cultural attitudes that are harmonious with nature and the passage of time. Clay has the most associative power in archeological terms and easily responds to the expressive needs of my ideas as well as being rather permanent and durable. Wood, stone, fiber, bone, and some found objects also work effectively as materials charged with connotative powers in this context. Hopefully, each element, as well as the whole body of work, contributes to the total effect of rediscovering an artifact that is evidently outside of our culture at one level, but reflects a kind of universal human consciousness and ultimately stimulates the perception of our own personal existence.”