Artist David Pagani

David Pagani is a painter and draftsman working in oil and charcoal from a studio in Corrales, New Mexico.

He came up through commercial art — twenty years of it, designing for some of the larger names in sports and entertainment, which taught him a great deal about deadlines and almost nothing about patience. He has a BFA from Carnegie Mellon and spent the better part of four decades drawing and painting on the side, in the margins, in whatever light was left at the end of the day. Three years ago he stopped hedging and made it the whole job.

There are two bodies of work, and they don't apologize for each other.

The first is portraiture — direct, slow, technically demanding, and concerned above all with the specific gravity of a particular face. He is a member of the Portrait Society of America and his first oil portrait commission won First Place in their Members Only competition. He entered the same painting in their International Competition and received a Certificate of Excellence. He then submitted it to the National Portrait Gallery in London, where it was shortlisted for the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award. The painting was subsequently published in International Artist Magazine. One painting. Three separate juries and a publication. He considers this a reasonable debut.

His portrait work extends beyond formal commissions into narrative territory — a painting of a young Native Pueblo Indian woman, rooted in the landscape and culture of his adopted New Mexico, was published in Southwest Art Magazine in conjunction with the Corrales Art Tour. It is a different kind of portrait: less about likeness than about presence, less about a sitting than about a place and the people who belong to it.

The second body of work is harder to categorize, which is part of the point. It begins with the American West — specifically with the version of it that never quite existed: the one Hollywood invented, burnished, and handed down as myth. His cowboys perform rope tricks. Some of the tricks are real. Some he made up. The costuming leans closer to musical theater than to anything you'd find in a tack shop, and that's deliberate — the work is less interested in the West as it was than in the West as a performance we've all agreed to take seriously. He has lived in New Mexico long enough to love what's actually here, which turns out to be stranger, funnier, and more theatrical than the postcards suggest. The paintings follow that. His work in this series has been recognized by the Mountain Oyster Club and received awards at MasterWorks New Mexico and the Rio Grande Arts Association's Encantada exhibition. He does not consider himself a western artist. He considers himself a painter who finds the West — the real one and the invented one — inexhaustible material.

He also paints landscapes when the light demands it, which in New Mexico is frequently.