David Tycho was born in Vancouver B.C., and later attended UBC, where he studied painting under Gordon Smith. After working through a number of Modernist styles, he arrived at his personal interpretation of figurative expressionism, which remained his focus until moving to Asia in 1984. In Kyoto, David was exposed to Shodo, a Japanese style of calligraphic painting. He was particularly intrigued by the paintings of Zen monks, whose fluid, gestural brushwork often renders the characters illegible, and ultimately abstract. At the same time, he was also inspired by the paintings of Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline and Willem deKooning, and David soon began to explore abstraction for himself. In 1990, David began working through a number of abstract styles: from gestural, painterly expressionism, to hard-edged minimalism. Since 1995, David has made numerous sojourns into wilderness areas, from the austere deserts of Nevada to the coastal rainforests of British Columbia. Forms and colours of the natural environment have found their way onto his palette, and, in combination with intuitive aesthetic impulses, the resulting works are a synthesis of landscape painting and abstraction. David has exhibited his works in Vancouver, Victoria, Kelowna, Penticton, Whistler, Calgary, Edmonton, Seattle, Los Angeles, Brussels, Geneva, Singapore and Manila, and his work is collected on three continents. He currently exhibits regularly at Petley Jones Gallery in Vancouver, Frame Society Gallery in Singapore, and Gallery I.M.A. in Seattle. In addition to painting, David is an often-published writer of articles on art, social issues and wilderness travel, and winner of a CBC Canadian Literary Award for a personal essay on Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. He has also contributed to two books, written eight screenplays, two novels, and numerous short stories, and has interviewed on radio and television numerous times. David divides his time between painting, writing, teaching, traveling, cycling, hiking and karate.