Looking & Seeing
one long look at one work of art
John O'Hern is an arts writer, curator and retired museum director who is providing a weekly contemplation of a single work of art from our gallery. In our fast-paced lives overflowing with information, we find it necessary and satisfying to slow down and take time to look. We hope you enjoy this perspective from John.

John O'Hern has been a writer for the 5 magazines of International Artist Publishing for nearly 20 years. He retired from a 35-year-long career in museum management and curation which began at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery where he was in charge of publications and public relations and concluded at the Arnot Art Museum where he was executive director and curator. At the Arnot Art Museum he curated the groundbreaking biennial exhibitions Re-presenting Representation. John was chair of the Visual Artists Panel of the New York State Council on the Arts and has written essays for international galleries and museums.
November 17, 2024
DANIEL SPRICK | Reclining Nude

Some contemporary paintings have staying power. Daniel Sprick’s Reclining Nude, one of the finest figure paintings in the first quarter of this century, is one of them. I first saw it at Skotia Gallery which used to be around the corner from Evoke’s original location on Lincoln Avenue.
In 2009 when “American Art Collector” was preparing its fall issue on the nude, I pulled together a list of artists and their work to include in my introduction for the special section. I shared the list (which I had labeled “John’s Nekkid People”) with Kathrine whose immediate response was “You have to do a show!” In 2010, Reclining Nude was in Representing the Nude, the first of three exhibitions I curated at Evoke and it is now available at the gallery.
I wrote an article, Gravitas, in the January 2022 edition of “Evokation” and referred to Reclining Nude:
“In her poem Evidence, Mary Oliver writes:
As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious
and full of detail: it wants to polish itself; it
wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in
the world that can hold, in a mix of power and
sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.
“Over the centuries, artists have used the human body as an object of beauty and as a means to express the non-corporeal ideas in Mary Oliver’s poem.
“Daniel Sprick refers to the representations of ‘a less obvious beauty’ in the paintings of Rembrandt and Courbet. ‘My subjects aren’t all beautiful,’ he acknowledges, ‘maybe 84% beautiful . . . There’s something marvelous about everyone.’
“When the painting was exhibited at Skotia, artists and non-artists clustered in front of it to appraise its surface and its depth, it’s lights and darks and its soft and hard edges. The model’s hip and left buttock are emphasized by her pose and by Dan’s use of light on her supple flesh. The light on her torso has a highlight that emphasizes her nipple. Her head is turned away, concealing her individuality and allowing us to look on her as the epitome of womanhood, formed by nature to bring life into the world and to nourish it. Despite her fecundity, in the lower left are her feet, the dried, cracked skin suggesting the transitory nature of her vitality.”
The surface of a Sprick painting is a constant push and pull between the reality of the image and the reality of the materials it is made of. If you get close enough to examine the surface you marvel at the technique that created the perfections of that watery eye or that glowing skin and then become aware of imperfections in the gessoed panel he has roughed up to better take the paint, and discover in a broad area of color a bit of dust or a broken bristle from his brush. He says that the pursuit of perfection can be a “thing that won’t set you free, ever.”
In 2014, the Denver Art Museum mounted the exhibition Daniel Sprick’s Fictions: Recent Work. At the time, Timothy J. Standring, now curator emeritus at the museum, commented, “Because he works in the vernacular of realism, viewers look for verisimilitude, as if his paintings were a mirror of reality—a reality you and I might encounter. The more we dwell on his paintings, the more we become aware that they are anything but a part of our world, and are, instead, poetic renditions of his own making.”
In 2015, Dan, Michael Bergt and I spent Thanksgiving at Michael’s sister’s home in Denver. We went to the Denver Art Museum where Dan was treated like royalty and then to the Clyfford Still Museum in a brilliant building designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture. It was particularly thrilling for me since I had had dinner with Still and his wife several times when I worked at the then Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.
Over the weekend, Dan, Michael and I had sometimes intense conversations about art. Michael caught Dan and me in one of those exchanges, as if we had ignited a fire in Still’s painting PHX-27, 1953.
Earlier this year, the Madden Museum of Art of the University of Denver mounted the exhibition, Fleeting Presence: The Liminal Art of Daniel Sprick. It was the result of the combined efforts of 15 graduate and undergraduate students at the university’s School of Art & Art History who had the extraordinary opportunity to work with local curators and art professionals, as well as the artist himself. They assembled 54 works from over 4 decades, representing the breadth of Dan’s career.
The student curators of the section on portraiture wrote that his portraits “explore duality and ask questions of life, emotion and time… Sprick’s work has an ephemeral quality that highlights the temporary nature of existence. His intentional use of grays and blues instill an overarching sense of melancholy, and his utilization of light instills a ghostly and transient feeling in his portraits… Through depictions of himself and others, he brings together the inner and outer worlds. He explores the tenuous space between life and death and demonstrates the constant slippage between presence and absence. Sprick pairs these concepts and places us in a new world outside our own.”
He comments, “I mostly see the world as a pretty good place. I guess that’s what I want to come though my work—something life affirming or some sense of well being, some optimism, some hope—even though I load it with portents of mortality and so forth. You know, I haven’t forgotten that those things exist, and I don’t think that the world is just a field of puppies romping in the daisies or anything, but it’s a good place, I just realize that there’s razor blades and cigarette butts, too.”