David Lenz

David Lenz (born 1962 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American portrait painter.

Since 1990 Lenz has painted intimate and highly realistic portraits of unsung Americans. Lenz is best known perhaps for winning the grand prize in the 2006 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Organized by the National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution, this inaugural competition attracted more than 4,000 entries from across the country. The resulting exhibition of 51 artists’ works were shown at the National Portrait Gallery from June 23, 2006 to February 19, 2007.

Lenz’s winning entry, an oil painting entitled Sam and the Perfect World depicts his son Sam, who has Down syndrome, amidst an idealized rural Wisconsin landscape.

The grandson of painter Nic Lenz, and the son of an art dealer, Lenz received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1985. In the spring of 1989, after four years in publishing and advertising as an art director, Lenz left commercial art to become a full-time fine artist. At first he painted landscapes based on his travels to northern Wisconsin and Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. These early paintings were influenced greatly by Tom Uttech, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and by the luminous light quality of Hudson River School artists Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Sanford Gifford.

After moving to the east side of Milwaukee, Lenz began to paint the neighborhoods and people of the central city. The city’s children, mostly African-American, very quickly became the focus of his paintings. In these works, completed between about 1990 to 2000, the hope and vitality of the children’s faces contrasts starkly with the worn down reused sidewalks, streets, and houses of the central city.

...
Wikipedia