New Exhibition! Arkansas: From the Tops to the Bottoms

May 09

by lcoston in Featured 1 comments tags: Acrylic Painting, Arkansas, Cantrell Gallery, Contemporary Art, delta landscapes, Rural, south Arkansas

New Exhibition! Arkansas: From the Tops to the Bottoms

Contemporary painter Daniel Coston’s ARKANSAS: FROM THE TOPS TO THE BOTTOMS opens May 12th at Cantrell Gallery in Little Rock, Arkansas, and continues through July 1, 2017. The opening night reception for the exhibition will be on Friday, May 12, 6-8:00. Please join us! It will be a great opportunity to visit with the artist while viewing his works. If you can’t make it that evening, the show will continue through July 1. Cantrell Gallery is located at 8208 Cantrell Road, Little Rock, AR. Gallery hours are Monday ”“ Saturday, 10-5:00. Call (501) 224-1335 for questions or directions. See the full exhibit here! Artist Statement, Arkansas: From the Tops to the Bottoms “Every year as I work on a new collection of paintings, I try to visually depict my home state – a personal and visual “state of the state”, if you will. In years past, I’ve seen the paintings as representing a horizontal trip around Arkansas, as I search for striking scenes. I’ve been making the trip from the hilltops of Northwest Arkansas to the Delta flatlands and back again for nearly three decades and the landscape continues to inspire me. Recently I have grown more aware of the […]

Dec 07

by lcoston in Commissions, Featured 1 comments tags: Acrylic Painting, Arkansas, commissions, delta landscapes, Rural

Commission – Rice Farm Work Crew

A long time ago, a couple of guys from Stuttgart, Arkansas traveled south to Drew County looking for a prairie to grow rice. They found just what they needed, bought some land and found water enough to start a farm. They were the first rice farmers in Drew County. This was the mid-1940s. In the early 1980’s, Monticello native Richard Reinhart commissioned me to do a painting of him standing on the edge of his rice field watching a storm brewing off in the southeast. Rice farmers have to watch storms because they can drop too much water on the fields and damage the system of levees, creating a serious problem. I was only too happy to do that for him mainly because it was such a good idea for a painting of life in my home area. I was really proud of that painting. Richard and his wife, Eddye Ann, have purchased my work occasionally and at the end of one recent commission they showed me an amazing photograph of a work crew on Richard’s father’s rice farm. There were 10 workers standing in a line. One of the two older men was holding Richard when he was a […]

Feb 19

by lcoston in Featured 0 comments tags: Acrylic Painting, Arkansas, Cantrell Gallery, Delta, delta landscapes, Rural

Daniel Coston to Exhibit New Works at Cantrell Gallery

Contemporary painter Daniel Coston’s BEYOND THE PHOTOGRAPHS will open March 11 at Cantrell Gallery in Little Rock, Arkansas, and will continue through May 7th, 2016.Â The opening night reception for BEYOND THE PHOTOGRAPHS will be on Friday, March 11, 6-8:00. Please join us! It will be a great opportunity to visit with the artist while viewing his works. If you can’t make it that evening, the show will continue through May 7. Cantrell Gallery is located at 8206 Cantrell Road, Little Rock, AR. Gallery hours are Monday ”“ Saturday, 10-5:00.Â Call (501) 224-1335 for questions or directions. Artist Statement, BEYOND THE PHOTOGRAPHS “Every year I take a lot of reference snapshots of Arkansas that I add to an ever-growing archive.Â Many of the images are useless but a few remind me of things I saw as a kid in Southeastern Arkansas.Â Some even seem iconic to me, expressing something about the geography we call home. So I work on these pictures…drawing the scenes until I think I can do something worthwhile.Â These photos evoke memories in me.Â I want to bring these memories back.Â At times, the memories could be about the sunlight on a particular day…the sky in […]

Jun 26

by lcoston in Featured 0 comments tags: Acrylic Painting, Arkansas, artist, Contemporary Art, Daniel Coston, Delta, delta landscapes, Mississippi River, Rural, south Arkansas

Delta Rocket: Leaving the Past Behind

If it is a hot still day some where on the delta, a scene that will always catch your eye is a vehicle (it’s almost always a pickup) roaring along a dusty road just slightly ahead of a cloud of dust. If it’s far enough away that you can’t hear it, the scene is all the more entrancing. The pickup seems like a rocket blasting off for a space station when in reality it’s just heading for the nearest store. I have that overall idea in my head a lot of the time. It is an iconic scene for the delta…any delta with crops in varying stages of growth. It could be a pickup bumping along a turn row or blasting down a dirt road on the other side of a field. If the weather is dry the dust will be deep and easily thrown up into the hot, still air. Some of these fields will have a family plot tucked away by a paved highway. Maybe there will be a couple of trees. If the tiny cemetery is really old the trees may be just stumps…or gone altogether. So I put these two ideas together and liked the way […]

Mar 22

by lcoston in Featured 2 comments tags: Acrylic Painting, Arkansas, artist, Cantrell Gallery, Contemporary Art, Daniel Coston, delta landscapes, Rural, south Arkansas

“Arkansas, As Is” Exhibition Now Open at Cantrell Gallery

Daniel Coston’s “Arkansas, As Is” opened March 20th at Cantrell Gallery in Little Rock, Arkansas, and will continue through May 9th, 2015.Â Cantrell Gallery is located at 8206 Cantrell Road, Little Rock, AR. Gallery hours are Monday ”“ Saturday, 10-5:00.Â Call (501) 224-1335 for questions or directions. You can view the entire show here. Artist Statement “This group of paintings primarily depicts the rural Arkansas landscape…as it is.Â These are places that you can see driving about the state but the majority are from southeast Arkansas. I never try to represent the rural scenery with a “halo.”Â Always painting scenes with bright, golden sunshine glimmering off old home places wouldn’t seem true to me. Portraying a variety of structures with a range of seasons, weather, and conditions seems more appropriate and true to how life really is.Â And whatever I come upon and see is fair game for my paintings. I enjoy painting fields, graveyards, historic churches, rusting vehicles, stores, cotton gins and a myriad other things with equal interest. Sometimes I paint a scene “the way it was” but mostly, I’m showing how things are in the present. Satisfaction for me comes from including enough visual facts and clues […]

Jan 05

by lcoston in Featured 0 comments tags: Acrylic Painting, Arkansas, artist, blues music, delta landscapes, Mississippi River, Rural

The Pull of the Mississippi River

Note: This is the first in a series of posts from Daniel on the topic of “Why I paint the Arkansas Landscape.” In this first post, he writes about the influence of the Mississippi River on his work. I came back to southeastern Arkansas in 1981 and soon got settled in Dermott. After getting organized at the high school there, I was soon drawing what I saw around me which was the Delta. The Mississippi Delta, that is. I could feel that river for the first time in my life. And that’s kind of odd since Monticello, my hometown, was only 30 miles further west. But Monticello was in the hills and Dermott had been flooded in the ’27 Flood. In the 80’s, I remember watching thunderheads boiling up over the river…just a few miles east.