Dan McCaw is one of America's most highly respected contemporary impressionists.  Raised in the mining town of Butte, Montana, McCaw began sketching and drawing at an early age.  In 1962 he began his formal art training with a scholarship to the San Francisco Academy of Art.  Two years later, he was offered a position as an illustrator with a commercial art firm in Los Angeles.  The move south proved to be a fortuitous one for McCaw, convincing him to abandon commercial art and begin a career in the fine arts.

He continued his artistic pursuits at the Art Center College of Design where he fell under the spell of the great European Masters, including Joaquin Sorrolla, whose work has had a lasting influence on his ideas about light and design.  While his sensitive figural work is deeply rooted in the romantic impressionist tradition, recent years have seen him moving toward a more individual expressionist style.  McCaw credits Eduard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Gustav Klimt, and the Abstract Expressionists for helping him to develop a heightened awareness in his work, choosing not to conform to the literal representation of the subject matter.  A skilled and discerning interpreter of color harmonies, light and mood, the core of McCaw's work is based on expressing feeling and emotions with the fewest possible elements, following the doctrine that less is more.  "My primary interest lies in going beyond the technique in order to interpret the subject in different ways and expand on that interpretation to make a personal statement.  Creativity lies in uncertainty because your solution can be anything"!

Nearly three decades after embarking on his artistic journey, Dan McCaw continues his quest for maximum expression, pushing his art into exciting new territory.  Dan McCaw and his wife Stacey live in Los Angeles, Ca.  He and his sons Danny and John  exhibited together at the Wendt Gallery in Laguna Beach, California in 2004.