David Cheifetz | The Edge of Realism

David Cheifetz colors his world and beyond

By Elizabeth L. Delaney

This story was featured in the July 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

“I try to push the color to the edge,” says painter David Cheifetz, whose sumptuous, dramatic still lifes and figurative works construct vignettes that don’t simply reflect but rather amplify—and, at times, transcend—the real world. They elevate and energize, moving beyond the mundane, out of the everyday, and into microenvironments full of luscious hues, heady contrasts, and an overall richness of place. Cheifetz’s character as an artist emerges in his release of total reality, in the enchanting objects that he paints, and in their color stories. In short, it’s a fascinating place for a former architect to have landed.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Cheifetz took an early interest in art and design. He loved to draw, to imagine and create things. At the same time, he looked up to his grandfather, a landscape architect, admiring the technical understanding essential for developing more structured creations. His grandfather’s career inspired young David, dovetailing with his drive to create, and eventually manifesting as a strong desire to become an architect—a path he started down in elementary school and followed through college, when he attended the University of Washington and earned a degree in the discipline.

After graduating, Cheifetz found a job as an architect; but after several years, he felt the familiar call to return to work that afforded him broader expression and creative autonomy. “What I wanted to focus on was just creating art,” he says. That opportunity arrived in 2007, when he moved to Washington, DC, while his wife attended graduate school there. Though he continued to work as an architect, Cheifetz also enrolled in Baltimore’s Schuler School of Fine Arts to further develop his drawing skills in hopes of pursuing a new career in comic-book illustration. However, he abandoned that path the moment he picked up a paintbrush and began applying thick, lustrous pigment to canvas.

“Very quickly I fell in love with oil painting,” he says of his initial foray. “It felt like the most ideal thing for me.” Indeed, the medium granted the artist complete creative control and a limitless vehicle for exploring his ideas. Additionally, oil painting gave Cheifetz a new, deeper satisfaction than what he’d gotten from architecture. “It was tangible and immediate,” he says. “I felt like it was the best of all things. I could be my own boss; I could create and then see that creation immediately.”

Cheifetz soon found success in the marketplace, selling the paintings he exhibited in art-school shows. In two short years, he completed his transformation from architect to fine artist, and in 2009, he became a full-time oil painter.

Adding to his immersion in the arena, he started teaching as well, first in Palo Alto, CA, and then in the Seattle area. “I recognized how formative in my life the art teachers at the Schuler School had become. I wanted to spread what I had learned, to expand as an artist and as a person,” explains Cheifetz. He began giving lessons in his studio as well as teaching numerous workshops nationally. These days, he also balances parenting with his career, but he still manages to teach several workshops around the country every year.

Today Cheifetz and his family make their home in Olympia, WA, where he maintains a painting studio above the garage. He works almost exclusively in his studio and enjoys the ability to construct every aspect of his pieces, from selecting objects to arranging compositions to lighting scenes. His oeuvre includes still lifes, figures, and the occasional cityscape, depending on what captures his interest in the moment.

It would be easy to cast Cheifetz as a visual storyteller, and while he is, to some extent, the artist maintains that his narratives materialize only as a consequence of the original visual story, or the relationships among the shapes and lines that originally piqued his interest. “It’s always a visual idea first. I don’t have a narrative in mind in the beginning,” he explains. “I like the idea of sparking the imagination of the viewer with the title, but I also don’t want to impose onto their ideas. I like to leave it open for other people’s personal interpretations.”

Indeed, it’s the aesthetic impact of the elements that drives Cheifetz’s process. “All I’m looking for is a visual spark,” he says, “the way the light shines on a certain material, the shape of the highlight, the complexity of the object, the color.” That spark becomes the focus of the composition, defined by the greatest detail, highest contrast, and most complex color values. He then adds supporting elements to round out the scene with multifaceted line, light, and texture across the surface.

Cheifetz works in a range of sizes up to 30 by 40 inches, half the time applying paint with a brush and the other half with a palette knife. He has always been enamored with the physical properties of paint: its heft and texture, its vibrancy, its ability to saturate and supersaturate. “I aspire to paint as thickly as possible,” he remarks. He especially appreciates the tangibility that thick paint lends to his work, along with the unique reality it helps create within the layers of colorful pigment. As he was taught at the Schuler School, he paints alla prima, wherein wet layers are applied on top of wet layers, all at once, for a fresh and immediate result. “If the lights are opaque and thick, and the darks are thin and translucent, that’s where the painting starts to become more sculptural, to feel more real and dimensional,” he says. To that end, his impasto application becomes the manner by which he builds the composition, using the paint, the arrangement of objects, the light, and the line quality as the architectural elements.

Color is key to his work, as it brings objects to life, at times carrying them beyond the reality of their everyday existence. Sometimes the color seems to take on a life of its own, free of the object it defines and existing alone on the picture plane.

“Color is one of the tools I use to create focus,” Cheifetz says. “For me, that’s the biggest thing. A painting is most successful when it has a very clear focus.” He spends a great deal of time determining the most effective balance of color in his paintings. In striking such a balance, he avoids the visual tumult of too much color or the anemic quality that comes with too little. “Having that one area of focus with intense color, with a restful area around it, is what gives you the impression of a colorful painting,” he says. “It’s not wall-to-wall color that makes something colorful. In a way, it’s the opposite. It’s learning restraint with the color. If one small area is highly saturated, and it’s next to a calm, less-saturated environment, that gives the overall impression of a colorful painting.”

Though Cheifetz spent much of his early life aiming for, and achieving, the narrow goal of becoming an architect, it wasn’t until he broadened his reach and made the leap into painting that he ultimately fulfilled the creative desire he had harbored for so long. In doing so, he has honed his talents and found his place in a relatively short amount of time, able to parlay his architecture and drawing experience into effective compositions within his paintings. Although he had never painted before entering Schuler, he had a distinct advantage in composition, perspective, proportion, and other elements of design. This allowed him to concentrate on the paint, its application, and eventually, color experimentation. Despite the fact that he decided to leave the world of architecture, he nevertheless appreciates the years of training and effort he put in, and he has reaped the benefits. Much like when he was a child, he has found a way to fuse the freedom of creativity with the discipline of technical design.

“I’m very happy with the path I took, doing architecture first,” says Cheifetz, who thrives on the twists and turns inherent in any progressing career. In fact, he’s continually searching for the challenge that will take his painting to the next level. As his work becomes what he describes as “less rooted in reality,” Cheifetz constantly expands his aesthetic viewpoint and expression, striving to insinuate something new into each painting he makes and “dancing on the edge of surrealism.” This typically involves color experimentation, or a more extreme departure from the recognizable world via fantastical creatures or situations. This type of growth mindset keeps his work fresh as well as deliberate while also providing an ongoing sense of discovery.

“I think I’ll never reach a point where my work reaches a level and then is consistent,” Cheifetz says. “It’s going to be constantly evolving, and I have no idea where that’s going to take me, which is kind of cool. That’s what keeps me excited about it.”

representation
Gallery 1261, Denver, CO; RS Hanna Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX.

This story was featured in the July 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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