It is a fine thing to have a painter in our midst.
The run-of-the-mill Washington exhibit is more about conceptual muscle - the right to hack away at boundaries others have successfully breached (and carted off joyously to other places.) Look at any exhibition calendar; DC is fairly lousy with the stuff.

David FeBland started out not as a painter, but as an illustrator. His technique is gorgeously developed, but, as all technique should be, in perfect tandem with the content it most agreeably serves. Even so, FeBland is a direct descendant of the Boldiniesque tradition which seeks to wow the spectator with painterly moves. Yet FeBland's capacity to impress with bravura alone is held in check by his ability to hang out on a limb and strike at the heart of who we are and how we manage in urban environments that are out of step with human needs, yet irreducibly private.
He has taken a brutally pre-emptive world and populated it, not with grinning lunatics, but people
with urgent needs and obsessive yearnings.

In his earlier paintings, human connection appeared somewhat implausible, as pools of bright tarmac and smouldering red brick sloshed together. The FeBland of this recent show has found, if not love, then a certain amiable lubricity. His women are fully in possession of an earthy, albeit cosmetically enhanced, sexuality - reminiscent of the Venusian babes Reginald Marsh could do without trying. (FeBlands Redhead could be "High Yaller" in a better neighborhood.) His people are often elongated, exuding a wild energy that seems to be slightly ahead of them. Caught in the snags of our alienating infrastructures, they make ecstatic bids for affirmation even as they burrow into their private worlds. The quintessential FeBland figure is on a skateboard - fitting for a guy who'd been a bicycle messenger. But FeBland isn't always running around; he has lately discovered a strain of simple humanity that has been largely absent from his work in the past. His picture vendor (Laws of
Physics) has given up, but is willing to go through the motions. In Path of Escape two Hasidic Jews stand before a high fence puzzling over a post-9/11 scenario. An enraptured luddite has taken "his last cassette" to an open field to admire its wind-borne destruction . FeBland's unflappable technique, however, goes a little haywire at times. In artists with smaller repertoires, it's easy to stick to tried-and-true formulas and keep on doing them at least indifferently. FeBland has to contend with such a well-tempered instrument that he sometimes has trouble reining it in. Subterranean, for all of its superficial graces, is eye-candy. Kaaba is a kind of girly picture surrounded with wink/wink quotation marks. We understand that we might be in somewhere in the Middle East. On its sandy bosom a man prostrates himself as some possible Americans observe or try not to observe him. But the babes the focus of the thing and we have to decide whether we can live with her callous narcissism, which may be a stand-in for All of Us. FeBlands larger narrative paintings lack, as a whole, the intriguing ambiguity that sets his work apart from the illustrative chatter he has, for the most part, eschewed. The exception is Keystone, which shows a robbery in progress, with the thief only a few paces ahead of his well-heeled pursuers: the lady incredulous; her boyfriend hopping mad; the long-coated felon trying his damndest to get away.
You look at it and think somebody has taken that soft-focus picture of a sophisticated couple, fast-forwarded it a frame or two and - voila! - we have a situation! FeBland's claim to our minds and senses consists in his persistent willingness to take the old picture and run with it - run well past our conventional expectations toward a place where the rulebook is held up to ridicule after it has been consulted on a fine point of construction.

collideAscope runs through November 4th at the Fraser Gallery, 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Ste. E,
Bethesda, MD, (301) 718-9651.