Daniel Coston                        

Three decades ago I started working with acrylic paint in college.  At that time it was a new medium.  It took quite some effort to get a feel for early acrylic paint because its consistency was not at all like oil, the medium everyone learned first.  Acrylics can be handled like oil or laid on like watercolor.  It also lends itself to a modified egg tempera technique.  My work is a blend of all these methods but leans toward the egg tempera technique.

          My interest in egg tempera came about because I saw what Andrew Wyeth and Robert Vickery had done with egg tempera.  I also use technical drawing pens for commercial work, which includes cartooning and book illustration.  The traditional crosshatch technique used in pen and ink shows up in my acrylic paintings.

          I do not favor a particular school or style.  My paintings are realistic and abstract, traditional and…different, sometimes within the same painting.  I work at this blend of techniques until the result matches my vision.  And…sometimes the vision shifts during the process.  My paintings appear to be realistic but I’ve never had much interest in being photo-realistic.  Just so it feels right is real enough for me.

           I was born in Monticello , Arkansas on a very hot (so I’ve been told) 4^th of July in 1945.  Very definitely a “homeboy”, I was hardly out of Southeast Arkansas until I attended Harding College in Searcy. I graduated in 1968 with a degree to teach art and math.  After that I spent some years in southern Delaware teaching and working on my art.  While there I illustrated a series of books for a local publisher about the Eastern Shore and seafood.

While living in Delaware , I delivered a lot of work to the folks back in Monticello .  My work hangs in homes and businesses all around town.  Some paintings are scenes of “old time” Monticello or of old home places that may no longer exist.  I don’t try to be a historical painter but some work is definitely just that.  It seems that when I paint Monticello , I paint things that are in the past.  I believe it is my way of remembering my childhood.

  After spending nearly ten years in Delaware , I moved back to Arkansas at the start of the 1980s and taught for five years in Dermott.  It was during this time that I gained control over the acrylic medium and started dealing with more difficult subject matter.  It was an exciting time because learning is always fun.  

        My wife and I moved to the Russellville area for a couple of years before ending up in Fayetteville .  My local work is a portrayal of the landscape found in Devil’s Den State Park where the rock, water and trees keep me artistically excited.  But I still retain an interest in the Delta and my “home” area in SEARK.  So I have a “cross section” of the whole state to work on.  And when I need another world…there’s always the Delaware beaches.