David Syre is an American outsider artist based in Bellingham, WA. Syre produces large-scale acrylic paintings, drawings, watercolors, and monumental art installations inspired by the subconscious, nature, and his travels. In recent years, Syre has exhibited in the US, Canada, Europe and South America.

Over the years, Syre developed and mastered this unique voice cultivated with experimentation, spontaneity, and an innate ability to grasp new techniques and adapt to new mediums. His technique often involves bold, fast-paced lines and brushstrokes, and an intricate, multi-layered composition of vivid colors. Especially visible in his large-scale paintings, Syre’s expression of the world around him is energetic and stylistic, involving thick applications of color with various methods such as dripping and lining. Syre’s artistic process is, in many ways, both ritualistic and mindful of the moment: His watercolors explore a more meditative, calculated process of painterly composition, but his expression stays similarly bold. 

For his signature style of drawings on black paper Syre uses a form of quick and powerful gestures similar to his acrylic paintings, referencing a recurring set of themes throughout, such as the universe, landscapes and architecture, tribute to the land, and totems. Critic Peter Frank writes, “In Paul Klee’s terms, Syre ‘goes for a walk with a line’ in each drawing,” and continues: “The method and format are constant (...) but the nature of the imagery flips back and forth between the referential, the rhapsodic (taking off from a hinted reference), and the purely fanciful.”

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