David Baird (b. 1986, USA) is an oil painter and draftsman focused primarily on figurative work.  The artist has attended classes throughout the US and Europe, including Ryder Studio School (NM, USA), the Art Students League (NYC, USA), Studio Escalier (FR), and the Jerusalem Studio School (Jerusalem, IL). He has traveled broadly, benefitting from extensive exposure to some of the world's greatest works of art.  In 2019, the artist was awarded the Avigdor Arikha Masterclass Scholarship to continue his studies in Italy.

He has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the inaugural exhibition Memento Vivere in 2021, celebrating the reopening of the historic Lyme Academy in Lyme, CT. In 2022, he won first prize in the New York Figurative Show at the prestigious Salmagundi Club in New York, NY, and was subsequently invited to exhibit in the first ever Hartley Invitational at the same institution in both 2022 and 2023. 

The artist currently lives and works in Lyme, Connecticut. 

"A fundamental interest in my work is the translation of perceptual experience into pictorial representation. In this conversion of perception to painting, the portrayal of form and the sensuality of experience is in constant tension with the materiality of the paint and the flatness of the surface.  Any pretense of fidelity to the visual experience is inevitably betrayed by the artifice of painting.

Resolving this tension between the object of perception and the fiction of representation becomes the subject of every work.  Like an inverted excavation, the accumulating layers of pigment contrive to unveil that perceptual moment, delicately balanced between the familiar and the unfamiliar where a whole is made of separate parts."