Dana Blume was born and raised in San Diego, California and is currently based in Seattle, WA. He earned his BFA in drawing and painting from California State University of Long Beach in 2019 and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Washington.

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Dana's work depicts a human adjacent reality where personal and collective human anxieties, hopes and absurdities are personified through unnameable creatures and awkward bodily forms. Some of his works depict specific narratives that serve as cautionary tales, where these creatures engage in compulsively destructive behaviors that result in comedically tragic outcomes. His hopes are that difficult feelings can live inside an image and prolonged material engagement with those images can lead to a clarity about personal and collective fears. The depictions of these destructive behaviors enacted by the protagonists of his work are never explicitly violent and in fact are quite light hearted, with hopes that if viewers could relate to the plight of these creatures, their hijinks could inspire levity, empathy and self acceptance. These works serve as a framework to investigate the cultural function of myth making and the monster as a receptacle for societal anxieties. In his more formally driven work, he investigates the connection between painting and paradeolia, our innately human desire and ability to see symbols, patterns and images in abstract phenomenon. He hopes to convince viewers that images are inherently abstract and that our ability to see images is not dissimilar to our childish capability of seeing “rabbits in the clouds".

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