David Skirkey

EDUCATION
St. Anselm College, BA Biology, Fine Arts Minor 1980
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Diploma 1984
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, 5th Year Program 1985

TEACHING EXPERIENCE
SMFA/Tufts Assistant Faculty, Art History, 1984-91
Art Teacher, St. Peter Academy, South Boston, 2005-11

EXHIBITIONS
Participant in annual MFA Staff Art Shows and in OPUS Artists Group shows at Cambridge College and Fenway Community Center
2022 Participant in Portraits of Leadership exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts Boston

STATEMENT
For years after I finished school, I worked with gestural abstraction, but in time hit a wall with it. I started over with a focused investigation of personal drawing. I've always felt comfortable working with graphite; it's a lot like painting. I would scribble and erase randomly (or not) until something figurative would condense. I don't worry about what to draw. Through play and storytelling, I let the subject come to me.

I have worked at the Museum of Fine Arts for many years. It has been a wonderful opportunity to live with and to study its collections. I have traveled in Europe a great deal and seen many of the museums there. The Rodin Museum in Paris I would recommend to anyone. It reveals much about his thinking. Daumier, too, has been important to me since I was a boy.

Lithuania, the home of my ancestors, is my favorite place to visit, with its moody skies, its forests and its broad fields, golden with rye and buckwheat. The cities and towns, with their gothic and baroque churches, are full of history long hidden from the West.

My little brother, who had Down's Syndrome, recently passed away at age 56. When we were boys, he imitated everything that interested him. He saw me drawing and did that too, and carried on with it for the rest of his life. When I got stuck and needed to start over, I imitated him--I scribbled until it made sense.

It's funny how things go in circles like that.