Artist Biography
David Alcantar (b. 1978, Laredo,TX.) is an American artist currently residing and working in San Antonio, Texas. Alcantar’s formal art instruction quickly began with the conceptual side of art making, emphasizing self-discipline and the development of a critical approach to both the process and the object as art.
David attended the University of Texas, with its undergraduate emphasis on formal technique, receiving his B.F.A. in 2000. Alcantar received his M.F.A from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2004.
Because of his interest for conceptual art, David studied about the sculptural aspects of painting, exploring installation and performance-based paintings and drawing, but never abandoning or rejecting the narrative tendencies or history of painting and drawing.
Alcantar’s master’s thesis in 2004 investigated the concept of beauty and asserted that the manifestation of beauty occurs only through sincere gesture (even those gestures that are not attractive or pleasurable, as long as they are sincere can be beautiful). This thesis resulted from cultural experiences, such as the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001, and personal experiences, such as the diagnosis of his father with terminal cancer. These events, and others that would follow, would eventually lead David back to his original attraction to drawing and painting: its narrative quality. Alcantar consistently explores how formal painting processes and the narrative tendency of painting can be used to pursue conceptual experiences.
Teaching
When given the opportunity, Alcantar teaches technical, conceptual, and critical development perspectives in art. His pedagogy emphasizes establishing a strong technical and compositional foundation; guided by artistic consequence, divergent thinking, group dynamics, perceptual curiosity, material experimentation, experimental processes, and mistake analysis; as vehicles to the creation of an active art that instigates discussions about and contextualizes contemporary issues.