Professional Motion Picture Production and Distribution NEWS

Dave Tourje has a lifetime of achievements as an artist, and is now featured in the LA Aboriginal film by Daniel Lir and Bayou Bennett.

(Los Angeles, CA) Dave Tourje’s artwork is a vivid, cross-cultural hybrid referencing some of the now-thriving urban scenes spawned from the Los Angeles of the 1970s where he was born and raised. Using bright colors and slick surfaces, his artwork is an amalgam of emblems expressing the unique dissonance and polyrhythmic tempo of the City of Angels.

Tourje’s later artistic education began at the Art Center College of Design high school program. He went on to study fine art at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and his artistic career multiplied from there. He paints, draws, sculpts and even creates furniture. To see his works, visit his website www.davetourje.com. Once you’ve delved into Tourje’s artwork, you’ve really just scratched the surface of his art universe.

The artist’s connection to the city’s cultural past goes beyond his art production. Prompted by his 1998 purchase and renovation of the Nelbert Chouinard house in South Pasadena, Tourje began researching the history of the Chouinard School of Art, which later evolved into the California Institute of the Arts.

Inspired by its legacy and roster of significant L.A. artists, including Ed Ruscha, Llyn Foulkes and Chaz Bojorquez among many others who would join his Advisory Board, he formed the Chouinard Foundation with artist Bob Perine in 1999, and in 2006 partnered with the L.A. Department of Recreation and Parks to bring art programming to the inner city. A documentary about Chouinard has recently completed production and is set to be released this Fall in coordination with the massive Getty-funded Pacific Standard Time- Los Angeles' celebration of it's own art legacy from 1945-1980. To be sure, Chouinard had much to do with that legacy.

In 2005, Tourje was part of a group that discovered "Street Meeting," the first mural painted in Los Angeles by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1932, hidden for 70 plus years under plaster at the original Chouinard School in MacArthur Park; a 2006 documentary on the mural’s discovery was nominated for an Emmy.

Tourje recently wrapped up his show "LA Aboriginal" at the Gregory Way Gallery in Beverly Hills, which led to a group of artists including Tourje to create "California Locos," a documentary about how the vivid, colorful and intense environments of Los Angeles affected prominent and influential artists including graffiti great Chaz Bojorquez, sculptor Brad Howe, graphic legend John Van Hamersveld, performance painter Norton Wisdom, artist/blues icon Gary Wong as well as Tourje. The film is currently under production by award-winning filmmakers Bayou Bennett and Daniel Lir of Dolce Films.

Resources:

www.davetourje.com