What Is Metaphorical Realism?

People ask me what to call my work, and the honest answer is that I had to name it myself, because nothing that existed quite fit.

Metaphorical realism is a painting rendered like something real, built around an image that could never actually happen, an image that carries the true feeling of a real life. The thing you are looking at is painted honestly. It is simply never only itself.

That is the short definition. Here is what it actually means in practice.

What it looks like

In one of my paintings a turtle crosses the desert with its shell opened like a lid, and underneath it is a whole town, everything it has been carrying the entire way. In another, a Western town grows straight out of a horse, the place and the animal rising from the same ground.

Neither scene could happen. Both of them are completely true. That gap, between the impossible picture and the real feeling, is where metaphorical realism lives.

What it is not

It is not surrealism, even though my images bend what is possible. Surrealism makes the strange thing the destination. The clocks melt, a ship grows from a seed, and the point is the dream itself, a way out of the real world. I love that work. Mine goes the other direction. The impossible thing in my painting is never the point, it is the vehicle. The town inside the turtle's shell is not a puzzle to solve. It is there because you already know what it is to carry your whole life on your back and keep walking anyway.

It is not straightforward realism either, where the goal is to render the subject faithfully and let that be the whole achievement. There is nothing wrong with that and it is not what I am doing.

And it is not allegory, where every element has an assigned meaning you are meant to decode like a puzzle. There is no key. If a piece only works once someone explains it to you, I have failed at it.

What it is

A woman standing at a horizon is a woman standing at a horizon. She is also the moment somebody decided not to go back. Both are true at once, and neither cancels the other.

The realism is what lets the metaphor land. If the scene were painted like a dream you would file it as a dream and feel nothing. Because it is painted like something that happened, it gets past your defenses and reaches whatever it was going to reach.

Why you never see her face

This is the part people notice most. In Time Stands Still, she has her back to you and you never see her face.

That is deliberate. The moment you see a specific face, the painting becomes about that person and your job becomes watching her. When the face is turned, there is room for you in it, and what people find is almost always their own life rather than mine.

Why the term covers everything I make

I work across materials, and I always will, so a label tied to a medium was never going to hold. Metaphorical realism is the frame that lets the range read as one vision rather than as several artists sharing a name.

The narrative work is story driven and figurative, dense with hand painted detail. The material work is abstract, sculptural and textural, built by hand from resin, mineral, glass, and real earth I carried back from Sedona, so the place is actually in the surface instead of painted to look like it.

They look nothing alike and they are doing the same thing. Both are made so the piece means something past what it depicts.

Whether the meaning is fixed

No, and I would not want it to be. I know what I was painting about. What somebody finds standing in front of it is theirs, and it is frequently not what I had in mind.

That is not a failure of communication. It is the entire reason to make the work rather than write an essay.

Most people do not choose a painting to fill a wall. They choose the one that says the thing they already believe and had never quite found the words for. That is what this way of painting is built to do, and it is why collectors tell me they are still finding new things in a painting years after it went up.

The Sands of Time collection is where the narrative side lives, and Below the Surface is where the material side is heading. If you would like to see new work as it finishes, the Collector's Circle sees everything first.

Warmly,

Dani