Dana Blume

Dana's work depicts a world where personal and collective anxieties, hopes and absurdities are represented through anthropomorphic creatures and personified objects. Some of his works depict cautionary narratives, where characters engage in compulsively destructive behaviors that result in comedic outcomes. He believes that difficult feelings can be contained in images and that prolonged material engagement with those images can lead to clarity about those feelings. The depictions of these destructive behaviors enacted by the protagonists of his work are never explicitly violent and in fact are quite light hearted, with hopes that if viewers could relate to the plight of these creatures, their hijinks could inspire levity and point at the absurdity of being human. These works serve as a framework to investigate the function of cuteness, cartoon language and the monster as a receptacle for societal anxieties in visual art.
Dana Blume was born and raised in San Diego, California and is currently based in Seattle, WA. He earned his BFA in drawing and painting from California State University of Long Beach in 2019 and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Washington.