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 Japan, David was particularly intrigued by the calligraphy of Zen monks, whose fluid, gestural brushwork often rendered the characters illegible, and ultimately abstract. At the same time, he was also inspired by the paintings of 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. In 1995, David began to make numerous sojourns into wilderness areas of North America, from the austere deserts of Nevada to the coastal rainforests of British Columbia. Forms and colours of the natural environment found their way onto his palette, and, in combination with intuitive aesthetic impulses, the resulting works were a synthesis of landscape painting and abstraction. A recent trip to Japan rekindled David’s interest in Japan and Japanese art, and his new series, “The Japan Series” is inspired and informed by this. 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 worldwide. In addition to painting, David is an often-published writer of articles and book contributions 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 been interviewed on radio and television numerous times. David now divides his time between painting, writing, teaching, travelling, cycling, hiking and karate. He currently lives in Vancouver with his wife Chiyoko and son Sean.