Daniel Ferlan works toward joy

Daniel Ferlan curated his previous solo show nearly four years ago in the wake of his mother’s death, embracing the exhibition as a way to memorialize the woman who remained an integral part of his life through the moment of her passing.

“You can prepare yourself, but I remember getting that phone call two days after Thanksgiving… and you’re never really prepared,” Ferlan said in early October from Sharon Weiss Gallery, where the Columbus artist’s new exhibition, “Tripping Over the Underneath,” will remain on display through Oct. 26. “It’s weird when someone’s here and then they’re not. And I know it’s a part of life … but the finality of that is scary.”

Rather than allowing himself to sink into despair at this notion, Ferlan leaned into the creation of his new exhibition as a celebration, noting the importance of living for the moment and “enjoy[ing] your time here when you can, because when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Each time Ferlan displays his work, he becomes aware of a larger story emergent in the display. “Tripping Over the Underneath,” from the artist’s perspective, more broadly unravels a tale that navigates anxiety, uncertainty, and despair to arrive at a place of joy. These ideas culminate in “The Mending of Candy Broken Hearts,” the final painting viewers come to in circling the gallery clockwise, and which depicts an assemblage of humans, monsters, and ghosts reveling beneath a rainbow-streaked sky.

“There’s always a sense of dark humor in my work, but I wanted this one to be more uplifting,” Ferlan said. “With this show, there was this idea that we’re all working to overcome things, whether it’s world events or life events.”

Throughout, there are intricate, narrative-driven paintings that explore everything from the daily troubles that sometimes threaten to consume us (“Another Worry,” which the artist said could encompass anything from financial concerns to fears of death) to the ways the people in our lives can help pull us back together in those moments when we feel like we’re coming apart (“Where Is the Rest”).

Collectively, Ferlan said, the paintings tend to serve as a deconstructed self-portrait, with aspects of his being and experiences surfacing in sometimes unexpected ways on the canvas. One hooved, skeleton-headed creature, for instance, has a neck made of twisted, flowering vines, which the artist traced to his mother’s love for the rebirth present in springtime – “There’s this sense of everything sprouting, of starting over,” he said – as well as the respite nature provided in the earliest months of the pandemic. 

Indeed, a number of paintings on display at the Short North gallery emerged as an extension of the creative outpouring that accompanied the arrival of Covid, a stretch in which Ferlan completed nearly 70 paintings, since there was little else to occupy his time. It also allowed him more opportunity to experiment with his approach. In the past, the artist said he would typically begin a piece by creating a detailed drawing on the canvas that he would then paint over – a technique he distanced himself from in more recent years.

“I have a degree in illustration but that’s not necessarily something I want in my artwork. … I’m a painter,” Ferlan said. “So, with these last two shows, it’s been exciting to have that control where I can literally paint right onto the canvas and not have that extra step. … I think now I’ve found this happy medium where it has this painterliness I like, where in a lot of these I really build up the layers of paint. … There’s just something to that where it really gives the work some tangibility.”

This approach also allowed Ferlan to evolve his paintings in new ways, describing how the flower-necked character within “Another Worry” took myriad forms before the artist landed on a final version, auditioning as a translucent being and an orb with a head before he scraped the canvas and started anew. “And when you build and take stuff off, I love how it gets this natural texture,” he said.

As with past exhibitions, the work on display in “Tripping Over the Underneath” is populated by a cast of seasonally appropriate characters who could have sprung forth from one of Tim Burton’s animated worlds. But while Ferlan enjoys the director’s work, he said the inspirations for his figures are rooted in an early childhood fascination with Roald Dahl, and in particular James and the Giant Peach. “I got the original book when I was in elementary school … and to this day the illustrations and the storytelling are probably one of my biggest [influences],” he said. “And it wasn’t even as much about the drawings as it was the descriptive writing. I remember the peach, and how he described the characters eating it when they were flying, and the birds carrying the peach, and the bugs. … And my work does, I hope, have that same sense of imagination in it.”

Generally, Ferlan said he has little idea what he’s wrestling with in the moment he creates a painting, with time and distance combining to bring these underlying inspirations to the fore. In the months before he became a father, for example, his subconscious led him to dot myriad paintings with eggs – symbolism that seems obvious to him now but was then shrouded in mystery. 

“I almost never sit down with an idea,” said that artist, who noted the memorial show he created in the wake of his mom’s death as a lone exception. “With everything else, it comes subconsciously. And I like that it’s a puzzle, that it’s something I have to decipher. Instead of going to a therapist, I can sit in my studio and start picking things apart, like, ‘This painting is about this, and this one is about this.’ … I never know what that next show is going to be until it builds itself.”