David Hornung “Intimate Visions” at Delaware Art Museum

David Hornung studied painting at the University of Delaware where he received a BA and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he earned an MA and MFA.

After college Mr Hornung took a teaching position in the art department at Indiana University-Bloomington. Since then, he has supported himself primarily as a professor of painting, drawing, and color at a number of art schools and universities in the United States. These include the Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, Skidmore College, Brooklyn College and The Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently teaching at Adelphi University in New York.

Throughout his career, Mr Hornung has pursued painting and has exhibited widely. He has also made fabric constructions, collages and has recently begun to experiment with a way to combine collage and cyanotype.

While a student at the University of Delaware, Mr Hornung was deeply affected by a color course based on the teaching of Josef Albers at Yale. Color became a major consideration in his work and, at Skidmore College in 1982, he developed his first color curriculum for undergraduate art majors. When he came to The Rhode Island School of Design in the mid eighties, he continued teaching color to undergraduates in a variety of disciplines. There, he designed color curricula for painters, illustrators, textile designers and graphic designers working at times in each of those departments.

By the mid nineties, Hornung's color course was offered every semester at RISD and, encouraged by a friend and colleague at the Art Institute of Chicago; he began to write a book based upon his color pedagogy. He was inspired by Edward Tufte's 1990 publication, Envisioning Information and particularly admired the straightforward design of Tufte's book and the way he placed his illustrations close to the text. Hornung decided to learn the software needed to design his book himself. After a 10-year gestation period, Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers was published in 2005 by Laurence King Ltd, London. Since then the book has been translated into five languages and a second edition appeared in 2012.