User:Panthermoderns/David Sandlin

David Sandlin (b. 1956) is an American artist and illustrator. He is well-known for his elaborate drawings, prints and paintings and installations. His limited-edition artists books are sought-after collector's items are and part of the MoMA permanent collection.

Eary life
David Sandlin was was born in 1956, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, of an Irish mother and American father, who was stationed in Northern Ireland during the second world war. The family moved to Alabama, USA, in 1972, where they lived in a rural city 60 miles from Birmingham. "Here I was stuck in one of the most rural counties in one of the most rural states in the country. It warped me forever." After graduating from high school, Sandlin moved to Birmingham. "My obsession with exploring American Puritanism, especially the fundamentalist Christian type, was already full-blown by the time I went to college". During that time Sandlin frequented country cloubs on the outskirts of the city and was marked by experiencing the contradictory morals of his contemporaries, who would drink excessively on saturdays and "go to some little baptist church on sunday mornings to be born again." *

Sinland
Sandlin developed a personal mythology in the series Sinland, an anagram of his name, a thematically unified body of work. The series "Land of 1,000 Beers" was one of the first manifestations of Sinland, which Sandlin calls a "secular treatment of Dante’s theme" that attempted to re-formulate [|Dante]'s explorations of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell in modern terms in [|The Divine Comedy]. Sinland is "a place of mortal love, with all the messiness of human foibles—lust, guilt, rock and roll", Pair o’ Dice is a place of Paradise, "a land of almost divine, not-quite-attainable, love". Damn Nation is hell, and incorporates the Pit of Frozen Love and the Pit of Porn "an unredeemed world totally without love and human sympathy".

Sandlin notably habitually uses his family and friends as models in his paintings. He lives and works in New York.