David Gallegos

David Gallegos is an American painter whose work has explored light, atmosphere, and spiritual landscape across more than five decades. Beginning with cinematic American road and landscape paintings of the late 1970s and the detailed Las Vegas night paintings of the early 1980s, his practice evolved through material experimentation with oil-and-sand surfaces and large symbolic compositions. During the 1990s his atmospheric landscape paintings created during his time working in Japan further deepened his investigation of horizon, reflection, and sky. After relocating to Hawai‘i, Gallegos developed a distinctive body of oil and pyrography paintings on wood depicting tropical sunsets and island landscapes. His most recent body of work, the Empyrean Series, consists of large-scale sky paintings built through the layering of multiple sunsets into a single canvas, creating luminous atmospheric fields that reflect decades of observation of light and landscape.