About David
David was born and raised in Chicago. He received a BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design (studying under Harry Callahan).
He started his college education as a philosophy major at Denison University in Ohio; and was in the Masters program for City Planning at Illinois Institute of Technology. He took classes in lithography & etching at the Art Institute of Chicago and in holography at Lake Forest College. He was staff photographer for Chicago City Planning Department; and scenic design painter for Tom Fulham Scenic Design Company (Chicago).
He has been making art his whole life, interrupted by brief stints of work for his father’s garden tool manufacturing company. In 1978 he and his wife Ann settled in Los Angeles, where he has continually produced art while they raised their two children.
David Hall: Cosmograph Series
“These past few years, I’ve discovered the joys of creating art on the computer. I’m an old-school kind of guy, but fell in love with the possibilities of color on the computer.
In the Tibet series, it all started with a box of 1950’s airplane flight maps I found in our garage that had been my father’s when we had our own small airplane on the outskirts of Chicago.
I’ve also loved maps, and especially these maps, which were detailed flight maps. I glued pieces of the crumpled-up maps onto big pieces of foam board, photographed them, then shined laser lights on them and photographed them again. When I downloaded the photos into the computer, I started folding them onto themselves, over and over, plus playing with color. I’ve always been fascinated by Tantric art and with the idea that one looks at a picture, relaxes the eyes and focuses on the center. That is what I intend for the entire Cosmograph series.
The other (3) components of the series…Strange Moons, Mandala Collection, and Cosmograph Collection, are reworkings of paintings that I made in my grandmother’s basement in 1968. I hand built a spray paint machine*. It started out as the American flag, deconstructed. This was during the Vietnam War.
Again, I took the series and played with the images on my computer. If you’d like to see the original paintings, visit my website davidwhitehall.com, fine artist.
*My great grandfather Harry Binks was one of the inventors of the spray gun during the American Industrial age. The line he created is still called the Binks spraygun, though he sold the business in 1928.”
—David