Don Resnick

Damariscotta Lake 47x60

Don Resnick was born 1928 in New York City, and lived and worked from his home-studio on Long Island, New York. He passed away in 2008.

Don studied at Hobart College in Geneva, New York; at The School for Social Research in New York City; and the Internationale Akademie fur Bildende Kunst in Salzburg, Austria.  He was a student of Oskar Kokoschka, Raphael Soyer, Seymour Lipton and Julian Levi.

Resnick is one of a handful of significant painters who continue to devote their talents to portraying the American landscape. Inevitably, his work has evolved and changed over time.

His most recent works revealed an increasingly loose, even impulsive brushwork, and an almost watercolour-like lucidity. There is also a fresh concern with the marriage between sun, sea and land that takes place during the setting of the sun. The resulting luminosity appears as a creative current throughout his recent works, whether depicting closely tangled woods or vast open shorelines. Light is the unifying element, even in his few quiet nocturnes.

In his paintings Resnick reveals that selective vision, born of a long and observant familiarity with his themes, amounts to what may be described as a creative instinct. The role of the artist is to take his theme, no matter how ordinary, and allow us to see it anew. Resnick works magic to make the commonplace transform into the luminous. (excerpted from “Don Resnick: Toward the Light” by Paul Duval)

Odon Wagner Galleries