Daniel Hendricksen is an artist with over 50 years of creative practice. Primarily a painter of landscapes, both as question-inviting abstract shaped-panel acrylic paintings and as completely recognizable plein air exercises. Daniel’s professional training came from Concordia University Chicago, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received his BFA degree in 1980. Daniel had a working career in retail photographic supplies, most recently from Central Camera Company, a historic photo business begun in 1899 in Chicago’s downtown Loop. He enjoyed having many meaningful conversations with artists using photography as their medium. Embracing retirement and moving from Chicago in the pandemic year of 2020 was challenging, but he found several supportive art communities in his new Twin Cities residence. Daniel received the Robert and Pamela Nuffert Best of Show award at the 2025 Into Nature Plein Air Competition for his painting Summertime Beach Day. Daniel currently resides with his wife Amy in Saint Paul MN.
About
Artist Statement
I like to think of my acrylic paintings as layered interpretations of landscape forms and depictions of ecological systems. So I begin by exercising, practicing direct observation through plein air painting. I use that body of work in order to inform the abstract paintings with a sense of familiarity towards specific landscape themes. I believe that observing nature, especially in these times, should also involve an awareness of the underlying and escalating worldwide climate damage. Therefore, my paintings display a synthesis, depicting both the beauty of the seen creation and the tragedy of its overuse and abuse by humans. My vocabulary of abstract, expressive brushwork is employed in response to colors, forms, and relationships found in nature as well as those encroaching upon nature. Contrasting elements such as stripes, geometric forms, grid patterns, and suggestions of human-built structures are used as compositional layers. I interlace these more hard-edged forms between the other more playful layers of nature-derived expressionist brushwork. Calligraphic marks - taken from an invented personal “alphabet” - suggest the presence of a maker’s creative force, marking some of the works with an opaque and mysterious message. In this way, I intentionally seek to complicate any straightforward reading of the work.
I’ve also chosen to use shaped wood panels for many of the pieces, to assert the painting’s physical reality. They are intentionally shaped from original rectangular panels which are broken apart by stress and chance, then cut with a saw. These panels are not just another flat surface to paint on, but objects, hovering off the wall and coming forward into our space. They claim their physical shapes, framed by shadows. At the same time the painted surfaces communicate implied illusions into other places and spaces. Thus, two kinds of reality coexist within each artwork.
Life and nature are full of struggle, differences and competition. This tension is what energizes all existence with unsettling events, relationships, and images. These paintings are intended to elicit questions. Rather than coming to a final resolution or the resigned acceptance of some received answers, I enjoy the mixture, the search, and the new questions that these tensions bring.