CLIFF WASSMANN

MEDIUM

Painting

ARTIST STATEMENT

“I’ve been exploring the merging of realities, overlaying the real and fantastical to create a different way of looking at the world and our place in it.”

ARTIST BIO

A third-generation painter, Wassmann grew up in a household filled with books on art and history. Of course his favorites were those with illustrations of the ancient world including the noted paleo artist Zdenek Burian as well as Charles R. Knight who painted the murals at the American Museum of Natural History of which Wassmann was a frequent visitor. This formed an interest in both paleo art and classic landscape painting. After High School Wassmann was trained as an oil painter at the nation’s oldest art school, the The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The East Coast has a long history of producing detail oriented landscape painters starting with the Hudson River School in the 1850s. It was this work that inspired Wassmann. But during a downturn his landscape paintings weren’t selling very well. Just for fun he edited some of the older works adding dinosaurs and other fantasy elements. The idea was received well and has been his focus since 2017.