Daniel Castan

“To speak about my painting… It is like asking a goldfish why he swims. He swims simply because he does not know how to do anything else. We can marvel at the spectacle or find it a sad triviality. The fish does not care. The only thing he asks is that no one comes to remove him from the water.” - Daniel Castan, Painter 

Born in 1959 in the Dordogne region of France, Daniel was drawing from an early age and went on to graduate from the Fine Arts School in Bordeaux. He then built a successful career as a graphic designer, founding his own firm and working with clients including UNICEF, Pierre Balmain, and the United Nations. At 40, he began to wonder what he had left behind. A meeting with the painter Pierre Doutreleau settled the question, and he committed himself fully to life as an artist.

His design years had taken him often to New York and Hong Kong, where he fell for the city’s sheer scale: skylines that vanish into the clouds, endless avenues, colliding colors. He began by painting from his own photographs, and canvas by canvas, from Brooklyn to Times Square to Radio City Music Hall, his New York became more personal, drawn as much from imagination as from memory.

Daniel paints in fast-drying alkyd oils, a good match for his temperament, and works almost entirely with a palette knife, spreading paint like paste, sweeping it in broad strokes, or drawing directly into the surface. The knife leaves no room for hesitation, and that suits him. He covers the canvas within minutes, then carves the paint almost like sculpture until the scene comes alive, finishing with a thick gloss varnish that makes the color glow. Working by instinct, Daniel lets the paint carry him toward a bold, uncluttered, nearly abstract vision of the city. He doesn’t overthink it. He paints.