by Dooney Potter
Oil on Canvas
20” x 16” x 1”
Dooney was born in Medellín, Colombia, and currently lives with his husband and creates his artwork in Wilton Manors, Florida. He earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 2004 and spent ten years in aerospace engineering at Boeing. During those years, he also studied under Russian Impressionist painter Irina Kirienko Milton in Washington State.
In 2014, he shifted into education, spending the next decade tutoring high school and college students across core academic subjects and standardized test preparation. Throughout these transitions, art remained a constant parallel practice. More recently, Dooney returned fully to painting and is now a full-time artist working primarily in oil.
Alongside painting, his broader creative practice includes poetry, short fiction, and tarot, which continue to inform his sensitivity to observation, symbolism, and human experience.
I work primarily in oil, exploring the relationship between the human figure and the environment, between very personal emotional states and the overarching mythic and social undercurrents. Figures and environments often echo or contrast with one another, creating quiet tension through posture, gesture, color, and spatial relationships. Thus my work is inspired by everyday moments and everyday people subtly elevated to resonate with mythic, social, and sometimes psychological themes, particularly the queer experience. My approach stems more from curiosity than overt symbolism, attempting to capture essence rather than a narrative with a clear resolution. Working both alla prima and in glazed layers, my goal is for color, texture, and technique to create spaces that invite reflection rather than resolution, art as a means of slowing down perception, holding ambiguity, and often resisting easy explanation.
by Dooney Potter
Oil on Canvas
20” x 16” x 1”
Dooney was born in Medellín, Colombia, and currently lives with his husband and creates his artwork in Wilton Manors, Florida. He earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 2004 and spent ten years in aerospace engineering at Boeing. During those years, he also studied under Russian Impressionist painter Irina Kirienko Milton in Washington State.
In 2014, he shifted into education, spending the next decade tutoring high school and college students across core academic subjects and standardized test preparation. Throughout these transitions, art remained a constant parallel practice. More recently, Dooney returned fully to painting and is now a full-time artist working primarily in oil.
Alongside painting, his broader creative practice includes poetry, short fiction, and tarot, which continue to inform his sensitivity to observation, symbolism, and human experience.
I work primarily in oil, exploring the relationship between the human figure and the environment, between very personal emotional states and the overarching mythic and social undercurrents. Figures and environments often echo or contrast with one another, creating quiet tension through posture, gesture, color, and spatial relationships. Thus my work is inspired by everyday moments and everyday people subtly elevated to resonate with mythic, social, and sometimes psychological themes, particularly the queer experience. My approach stems more from curiosity than overt symbolism, attempting to capture essence rather than a narrative with a clear resolution. Working both alla prima and in glazed layers, my goal is for color, texture, and technique to create spaces that invite reflection rather than resolution, art as a means of slowing down perception, holding ambiguity, and often resisting easy explanation.
