The Art & Writings of Daniel Ambrose
Moon and Dune Flowers is a quiet, humble painting. Simple at first glance, yet it speaks of deeper things. I think it is about light and hope. Over the years, I have painted many seascapes. One day, while walking up the dunes toward the beach, l listened for...
Artificial intelligence inserted itself unbidden into my thought process as I began this post. It offered to generate my reflections on this egg tempera painting—stringing together words scraped from the internet rather than words forged by the life I've lived. How...
Summer thunderstorms hurl lightning bolts at the sea like javelins from an ancient warrior. Thunder crackles through gunmetal-gray air, rattling the windows. When the skies clear, sometime before twilight, a slender crescent moon hangs low in the southern sky. A...
Around 1990, I paddled my canoe down the river that I was living on to a weathered old cedar stump where I knew a Great Blue Heron hung out . Before the heat settled over the salt marsh, I sketched her standing in the brackish shallows. For nearly twenty minutes, she...
Somewhere in time, through a translucent veil of misty light, they come. Ibis move in milky water, weaving their way through a cathedral of mangrove roots, like dancers in a slow, graceful waltz. This I am sure I once saw—or have I only dreamed it? This scene...
On this day, forty years ago, I set a ten-year goal for my painting. I was in a room in the house that I had built, standing at my easel. With nothing but a sketchbook, rickety easel, some cheap canvas boards and a few acrylic paints, I set my mind to see how far I...
Golden Slumber is an oil painting currently in the American Tonalist Society, Shades of Gray III Exhibition in Sheridan, Wyoming. The painting is available at the hosting gallery, Ballard’s Fine Art. The show runs September 4 - October 12, 2025.
The Empress is the third white bird in this series. Don’t know where they came from, or when they’ll run their course, but I feel like they are speaking for me. Speaking to us. Speaking for a reason to be revealed in time. All things are. Like flowers that come into...
Huntress and Hunter are the first two paintings in a new series. Snowy is the third. Painting birds larger than life-size would have been a foolish notion in my early bird painting days. A threshold I would not have crossed. Back then, I was interested in anatomical...