Background
David Berkowitz Chicago is an American artist known for his playful, airbrushed acrylics and naïve style. David thinks of his paintings as sharing an isolated moment, keeping it alive and making it timeless. In his view, for painting, you need a lot of guts, you need to be passionate and you also need to be attentive and listening. If you don’t have these guts or this kind of strength in your painting, things won’t really come through. You need to take it from inside and bring it out. Find what inspires you and stick to that. Listening to music is what helps David to paint. While he paints, he listens to music most of the time. In fact, he often compares painting with dancing. When you are painting, you are using your whole body. You are standing on your feet, moving back and forth, using your arms, moving your head. It’s like a dance. So the music enables you to connect all of that. This visualization is important to be able to focus, which a prerequisite for painting. To David Berkowitz, painting is like a dance and music acts as a catalyzer to put on the canvas what he wants to express.
This naive painter leaves a lot of room for intuition and dialogue with the object. The initial planning becomes less relevant when the process has started and the outcome emerges from the process. That is why the final result changes a lot. There are times where he just paints and paints, and even though he has made a plan, all of the painting is just arbitrary, it just flows in a way that he can’t control it anymore. So, most of the time he doesn’t plan anything, and it just comes out in the painting.
The notion of feedback is an important point to David Berkowitz Chicago, and he uses it to foster reflection. It enables him to get a fresh view on his works. In his eyes, a feedback worth hearing is a sincere analysis.
Artists have a certain ability of reflection because they are engaged all the time with being creative, challenging, and engaging in certain themes. David feels that artists have a very strong reflection of society and of people and of who we are. He thinks that these things are connected. He always pushes forward, because art is a language that people add to.