David Linn was born in Palo Alto, California and grew up in the hills of the South Bay peninsula. He began painting shortly after birth and has only occasionally paused to pursue other interests such as music composition and performance, mountain climbing, and designing objects that fly. He recently received an MFA in painting from Brigham Young University, and currently resides at the foot of a mountain in Elk Ridge, Utah. He cites influences as divergent as Baroque masters and American Luminists to contemporary Conceptual Site and Earthwork artists. David’s work can be found in various museum, corporate, and private collections throughout the country.

“My work is born out of a need to articulate for myself the terrain of my own passage through mortality— to explore the events and implications of a spiritual existence forming currents that flow beneath the observable world. The symbolic internal worlds and environments of my paintings seem at times more real to me than my physical environment because they are evidence to me of what is felt most acutely. The paintings then become objects of devotion—personal evidence of a process that is, for me, verbally inexpressible. My work has evolved into a meditation on themes of searching, passage, and purification through these internal wilderness places—a landscape where events and objects assume multi-layered symbolic significance and actions become ceremonial in nature.