An installation of lightpanel murals created for Burning Man and the British Library
David Normal in front of "Ostrischizocracy" at the British Library, 2015. Photo by Duilio Marconi.
David Normal Summer 2015
David Normal is a San Francisco painter and animator. Born in 1970 San Francisco, he is the son of Paul Butterfield Blues Band keyboardist, Mark Naftalin. Normal began his career in the late '80s making Punk fliers around the Bay Area. Throughout the '90s he created a series of what he dubbed “interactive theater parties” and also created large scale sculpture for the Burning Man Festival. Normal has traveled extensively in South-East Asia to document rituals of trance and spirit possession, an archive of video documents known as “Loose Spirits”. He has produced two animated shorts, “The Bicycle Ride” and “Pyramid”, both expressions of his deep appreciation of the psychedelic experience. Since 2008 created a series of oil paintings based on his philosophy of “Crazyology”, and displayed them throughout the U.S. and in Europe as unique glowing prints known as, “Illuminations.” An ongoing side project involves drawing scenes of bondage from life in a series of life drawing sessions called “Shibari Sketch”, and multiple trips to Japan to work with masters of Japanese rope art. David Normal’s current work is the “Crossroads of Curiosity”, an epic suite of lightbox murals that was created for Burning Man in 2014 for the theme of Caravansary and is now on display at the British Library.
More of David Normal's work may be found at: