A new artist in town bears watching. Daniel Coonfield is an academically trained painter who likes an artistic challenge, as seen in his current exhibition at Buzz TV Art Gallery. At their best, Coonfield’s figural compositions are complicated, their narratives ambitious. At 32 years old, this aspiring master of post-contemporary art still has his career ahead of him.
The tradition of the art academy began in Europe, usually by royal degree. The goal of the academy was to produce competent artists whose creations would uphold the ideals of the church and the glories of the state. But the academies were not only schools. Some of them evolved into learned societies where select artist-members declared that the values of academic art were those by which civilization itself should be judged.
By the 19th century, the heroically virtuous art of the academy fell behind the times. The French Academy, for instance, used its considerable moral and political authority to suppress artistic upstarts like the French Impressionists. We all know how that fight ended.
Yet America – the home of personal independence and the democratic process – remains entranced by the European tradition of what is fine and beautiful in art. In other words, we like pictures in which we can tell the heroine from a herring. The National Academy in New York was founded on that fine European tradition, as was that city’s Art Students League and Chicago’s American Academy of Art – Daniel Coonfield’s alma mater.
Coonfield traces his family history back to the Native Americans who first peopled this continent and the pioneers who later made it their own. His paternal great-great-grandmother, Sarah Bluebird Smith, was a full-blooded Cherokee. Born in Indian Territory in 1845, she died in Oaks, Missouri, in 1926.
Coonfield’s mother, Kathleen Lyle, is from a long line of Missourians; she now lives in Vero Beach.
“She’s an artist as well,” he notes. “She does landscapes and seascapes.”
Coonfield’s late father, James Wallace Coonfield, was a medical doctor. Born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Dr. Coonfield lived and worked in Kansas City, where he and Daniel’s mother raised their only son and six daughters. (The doctor’s second marriage, in 1991, produced another sister for Daniel).
Coonfield traces his boyhood love of art to a book about Salvador Dali that his father brought back from a trip to Spain. When it came time for young Coonfield to attend college, he chose the venerable School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
He was a student there for only one semester, when he found that the school had long ago abandoned a curriculum that emphasized realism in art. That, and mastering the depiction of the human figure, were skills Coonfield craved. When one of his teachers at the Institute suggested he apply to the American Academy of Art, he applied to its BFA program. He graduated in 2007.
In school, Coonfield’s area of specialization was oil painting. His classes focused on the technical aspects of the craft: drawing and painting from the figure, as well as anatomy, color theory, lighting and composition. Theoretically speaking, the school required that Coonfield know about, and learn from, the works of historically important artists.
In his own work, Coonfield incorporates themes and even visually alludes to some of the figures seen in the art of those masters.
One of his favorite artists is Édouard Manet, a Parisian painter of contemporary life who worked in the latter half of the 19th century.
“There is a strong psychological element (in Manet’s pictures) that for me is very resonant,” says Coonfield.
In 1865, Manet’s nude “Olympia,” a depiction of a high-class French prostitute, scandalized a public used to the moralistic paintings of the academicians.
While Coonfield’s palette and manner of working are not those of Manet, he does profess to paint the people and life of our times. Like Manet (who borrowed Olympia’s pose from the reclining Venuses of 16th century Italian painters Giorgione and Titian), Coonfield intentionally quotes the postures of the gods and heroes depicted in artworks of yore.
Measuring 42 x 60 inches, his 2016 painting, “Jesus calling the Disciples,” shows Jesus, Simon and Peter not as the long-haired, robed figures familiar from traditional religious painting. If it weren’t for the rays of light shining from the three principal figures’ heads, they could be mistaken for some bare-chested guys in shorts – in fact, the top of Jesus’s boxers is showing. The three could be hanging out at a concrete pier anywhere along the Indian River.
The iconography is lacking to clearly distinguish who is who in the picture. Simon and Peter are “sort of interchangeable,” says Coonfield. But Jesus is the one toward whom a couple of fishing rods point, set down on the ground. His is the figure whose muscular chest is modeled by a bright directional light source. He is also the one who stands in the posture reminiscent of Michelangelo’s “David,” with one hand casually resting atop his shoulder.
The two largest figures in the composition are idealized depictions, says Coonfield. He says that “all the other figures” are based on his on-site drawings of Floridians going about their business.
“This man who’s looking through his net, and these two gentlemen that are fishing, I sketched those guys on the spot. They had such fabulously expressive postures.”
Another painting, The Battle of Tahlequah (2011) shows a bucolic incident in which two men fight each other as their respective girlfriends look on. One of the women – the hefty blond to the right – has an oar raised above her head as if to strike one of the already bleeding pugilists.
In the foreground, a group of two men and a woman guzzle beer. Coonfield says that this picture is thematically based on Renoir’s “The Boating Party” – a charming outdoor scene of the artist’s friends socializing over lunch.
His reference to that painting, says Coonfield, is not about violence. It is about differing styles of partying. In Oklahoma, he says, it is common for local young people to raft down the Illinois River through Tahlequah.
“People go and get really drunk and fight,” he explains.
His painting, he says, is “supposed to be America’s answer to “The Boating Party.”
Two of the male figures in the painting are dark-skinned; they represent American Indians, according to Coonfield, who adds that his painting’s theme is alcohol-fueled violence in the Native American community.
He suggests that the Caucasian–looking figures in the picture might also be Native Americans.
The show’s “Portrait of an American” alludes to Coonfield’s own Native American background.
He shows himself in a Daniel Boone-style fringed buckskin jacket, worn over a plaid shirt and blue jeans. His face is painted in red, white, and blue stripes; two stars decorate his forehead. In his hand he holds a ceremonial feather fan crafted by one of his father’s cousins.
Unlike some of his other paintings, there is little reference to traditional European art here.
This portrait is “supposed to symbolize that being American Indian is being very American, I guess,” he says.
Daniel Coonfield’s paintings can be seen through March at the Buzz TV Art Gallery. It is located Suite 5, at 2345 14th Avenue in Vero Beach.