Artist's Statement

The purpose of my life is to create and build. From a childhood ambition to become an architect, to my study of both art and music, I have endeavored to explore every interest in the arts with equal earnest. As I start a new chapter in life, after leaving a fledgling career in the business of design, I am for the first time searching for an identity as an artist. I did not have a false start, but an awakening - a challenge from my god to use all of the talent he has given me to its fullest extent.

I began a formal and uninterrupted study of music at the age of six. Parallel was my delight in building, lost for years in building blocks and Legos. Playful woodworking, music and interest in all things antiquated lead to an attraction to historical lutherie at a young age, and I had made my first accomplished stringed instruments by the age of fifteen. While at the University of Georgia, studying interior design, I began to realize that I could build what I designed, and painting became my means of self-expression. My sculpture, drawing, and metalworking classes gave me the training to see shapes and work with material, and give reason to my adolescent accomplishments. I found that for me, the idea of the mind and the product of the hand should be joined as one effort. And in studying the Bauhaus school, and the Arts and Crafts movement before it, I found models for this ideal. I realize that I have not a diffusion of separate interests, but a co-operation. The draftsmanship of a designer proves proportion and practicality. An affinity for line and form in three-dimension makes paintings of depth and beauty.

My paintings are objective, but stimulated by emotion for the object. I use allegorical or classical settings to reflect personality. My furniture can be contemporary, of my own designs focusing on the raw material, or antiquitous, made with my love of history. American colonial and Prairie styles are a special interest. Lutherie symbolizes for me the ultimate employment of art, science and craftsmanship. Research is a never-ending occupation, and my studies have led me to instruments in museums and private collections, making my own field drawings of extant instruments. I have made citterns, early fiddles and viols, dulcimers - and my present focus is the lute - all based on historical examples.

A native of Ohio and raised in Texas, I have made Georgia my home, where both sides of my family have lived for generations. People and place are important to my work as an artist. My inspirations are family, friends and neighbors and the landscape in which we all exist. I am a painter of personalities and an interpreter of history. My favorite rambles: the North Georgia mountains, the inner-coastal waterways, and the legacy of my home near Stone Mountain all fuel creativity. Travels abroad, including a recent journey with my family to our ancestral home of Central Ireland, and a profound meeting with my own origins, further my education. I see something of interest in every place I visit and every person I meet. These experiences continue to shape my ideas about the art of creation and my role as an artist.

Daniel Joseph Betsill 2000

Bring it HOME.