Dale Landrum was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up nearby in the San Fernando Valley. His parents were passionate music lovers;
" I grew up with a lot jazz and Frank Sinatra in one ear, and classical and pop in the other--we always had a lot of great sounds going on". It was drawing airplanes, however, that first became somewhat of an obsession for Dale. "My first canvases were my bed sheets, with airplanes and runways, and when I was about two years old I used the hallway wall for an airport mural attempt. My parents weren’t thrilled with these early expressions”. He was also influenced early on at home by charcoal figure drawings, and old notebooks of colorful "Hollywood Era" fashion illustrations done by his mother.
In 1977, Dale moved to the Redwood Empire of California’s north coast, where he continued college and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Resources Planning from Humboldt State University. During his time as a graduate student in the natural sciences, he was inspired by a few local oil painters and became very interested in landscape painting. This is when he began copying works of art by some of the earlier masters of painting. “I had a ‘minor’ in art history as an undergraduate, so I was quite familiar with the great masters of the renaissance and many other ‘schools’ in the history of western art”. Although Landrum worked as a biologist-botanist for the federal government until 2002, he dedicated himself over the years to learning the craft of oil painting. He spent a couple of years in northern New Mexico in 1987-88 where he became inspired by some of the old "Taos" school of artists. “The environment of Santa Fe and Taos is what really set my sights toward oil painting. My spare time after work and on the weekends was dedicated to painting on location. I was living in a beautiful red rock canyon in the Jemez Mountains near Los Alamos, and I’d get off work and within minutes I would be setting up my easel and applying paint.” He began selling his first regional landscape paintings in the Santa Fe area at this time.
Currently, he is represented by Adieb Khadoure Fine Arts, in Santa Fe, Austin Galleries in Austin, Texas, The Sacred Dancing Gallery in Bigfork, Montana, and The Castle Gallery in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Dale resides with his family in southern Oregon.
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