David Starfas

Evander worried about many things. The more he worried the more his work piled up. Sometimes our anxiety prevents us from being able to do anything and all we can do is focus our energy on worrying. Sometimes our anxiety helps us come up with clever innovative solutions to the things we are worrying about. Will Evander be able to come up with a clever solution for what worries him?

Who is Ready? Not Yeti. A getting ready for school book. Yeti feels like he is never ready. He knows what to do. Sometimes he just gets a little distracted.

A hunting story.

I heard it said once that re-piecing history together is closer to fiction than it is to the empirical facts that we like to attribute to truth. Truth is often difficult to find and we need multiple lenses to see it more clearly. History is not an A plus B equals truth equation but it is an endeavor that has value and will lead us to meaningful truths. For this reason I have always imagined the big names in the history of ideas, the philosophers, to be more like mythical creatures who have blurred the lines between history and fiction in order to get closer to more meaningful truths.

Friends and colleagues asked me for more affordable portraits. Well Dressed Animals was a style I developed in order to offer just that. These custom portraits are acrylic on a digital background. If you are interested please email me at ds@starfas.com

"The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy..."

The Fire Grass is a grassy plain where children go to play in between a great city and an ancient grove of oak trees. At dusk and dawn the sun casts its golden light on the plain and the grass looks like fire.

The story begins,
"Children lived in the plains. They were different from the children who lived in the city. They worked where they lived and they played where they worked. The children from the city came to the plains often but the plains children rarely went to the city."

If there was a word like androgyny for age, meaning you could not tell whether someone was old or young, that would be the title of this series of portraits. These paintings of children are meant to cause you to second guess their age–to make you ask are these adults trapped in a younger body?

These paintings are of family, friends, and a mountain. The animals are pets or interesting animals. They are painted from life and photos, in oil, acrylic, and mixed media on panel or canvas. If you are interested in commissioning a portrait of a person, pet, interesting animal, or an element of nature email ds@starfas.com

    This project was done with The Brandeis School of San Francisco. Every student and faculty member created an element of the painting. I scanned every element into the computer, assembled it digitally, printed and installed it on the wall.
    First, I taught a mural class where my students learned a variety of painting techniques and painted trees and buildings for many weeks. Next I scanned the trees and buildings the students painted into the computer. In photoshop I assembled the trees together to make up Golden Gate Park and the buildings to make up the San Francisco skyline.
    Second, every student in k-5 painted a square sheet of paper. They cut these colorful pieces of paper up into an original star shape. All 230 students made a star that would eventually be pasted to the wall to fill the sky of the mural with stars.
    Finally, every middle school advisory received an empty silhouette of a bird. Using colorful pieces of paper and markers the students created feathers and collaborated in their groups to make a bird. The faculty and staff also received an empty silhouette of a bird and made a bird of their own. These birds were scanned into the computer, shrunk down, and photoshopped into the trees of Golden Gate Park.
    Once all of the parts were finished the mural was printed out on an oversized fine art printer and installed like wallpaper. The image and work was tied into the themes and values of the school.