Dawn Spencer Hurwitz Fine Art

I'm Dawn Spencer Hurwitz; Painter, Olfactory Artist, Jewelry Maker, and Synesthete.

I've been drawing and painting for most of my life, and while I've been classically trained at art school, I'm really just emerging into the art community.  On my journey, I became a pioneer of the American indie perfume movement, and through that came to understand my synesthesia.  I then became a self-taught jewelry maker, creating miniature, wearable 'paintings' in gemstone assemblage form.  By exploring these avenues, I have come to find that whether I am composing a fragrance, a necklace, or a painting, it's the same sense of color, line, shape, space, relationship, and emotion that I am after; they all inform my sensibility and visual style.  I like to draw and paint the ethereal; emotions as landscapes, landscapes as color, line, and shape, drops and brushwork together.

Sometimes I want my visual works to be intimate, like jewels, and for larger scale works to feel like a window into another world.  Either way, for me it's about the senses and our interaction with them.  I tend to work in themes and collections, working on multiple ideas and works at the same time.  This allows me to switch gears mentally so that I can see with fresh eyes as I come back to work, again and again, until the image is complete.

In art school, I fell in love with the medium of egg tempera for its lush, pure colors juxtapose gold leaf.  The contrast of color next to metal leaf and pigments excites me!  This love is still found in abundance in my contemporary work.  I find the mix of hue with metallics so incredibly beautiful and I hope you will, too.