David Z Orban

David Z Orban is a New Jersey-based figurative painter. He works primarily in oils and has exhibited widely throughout the Northeast U.S.

Orban has been in more than 200 group exhibitions at galleries and museums, and had several one-person shows, including three solo shows (1986, 1987, and 1988) at Blue Mountain Gallery, then located in New York City’s Soho area. His work is included in public and private collections, has won several awards, and has been published. His last one-person show was in 1991 at Rider University, after which he took an extended, two-decade hiatus from painting. 

“In much of my work over the last 35 years, I’ve concentrated on the interplay of unusual collections of objects in contrived, artificially lit interior settings. This stems from projects I’d developed for undergraduate classes, in which I sought to teach students how to ‘see’ with their eyes… not with their brains. For example, a student sees a chair and renders all four legs squarely on a horizontal floor, regardless of whether they’re all on the same plane… or even visible, for that matter. Similarly, a student sees a still life with a white drape in it, and invariably starts out with gobs of white paint to render the ‘white’ of the drape. But the white drape is anything but white… more likely it’s a middle gray value, tinged with reflected or ambient light. 

To illustrate this, I began setting up very elaborate still life arrangements, suspending objects from the ceiling with fishing line, to remove their ‘functional’ objecthood, and force students to consider objects based solely on their spatial relationships with each other. By adding theatrical, colored lighting, I was able to literally change the color of objects, forcing students to learn how to see the color of an object relative to the rest of the arrangement. Early on, I’d do a quick paint sketch to demonstrate the concept. Over time, I became so interested in this process that I began to incorporate it into my own work; first in large paintings of nude models in elaborately constructed, colorfully lit environments; later, taking the same approach with smaller-scale still lifes.”

“I like the juxtaposition of playful objects — primarily balloons and antique toys collected over the years — against utilitarian objects such as hand tools and machine parts. The compositions are typically lit using one or more colored lights, throwing intense, high-chroma color against deep shadows. I try to find a balance between achieving a ‘realistic’ rendering and allowing the physicality of the paint – and the ‘process’ of painting – to remain visible.”

A B2B technology marketer by day, Orban is an accomplished musician, leading The Mojo Gypsies, a blues/R&B quartet that he founded in 1998. In addition, Orban taught undergraduate-level classes for several years, at Mercer County Community College; Princeton Art Association; Artworks; and most recently at Rider University, where he taught advanced web and multimedia techniques. Orban lives with his wife, the artist Mary Yess, in a restored, 18th-century farmhouse in Hamilton, NJ.