Dale Dolejsi presents
I focus on creating images that reveal humanity’s hand on its environment. The structures and objects in my images serve as both subject and symbol as well as artifact and warning.
As I work en plein air, my drawings and paintings are executed in single sessions with energy, intuition, and speed. My prints are executed in series, often in single sessions, where I respond to the surface and make changes that lead to the next variations. Painters and printmakers who value process filled with experimentation, exploration, intuition, and revision like Richard Diebenkorn, Elizabeth Murray, and Kerry James Marshall have shown me a path that is filled with energy and adventure.
I am drawn to moments of stillness even as I wonder how long they have left. This duality - the profound joy of being alive on this planet, and the grief of witnessing its unraveling - fuels my practice. We are living in a time of great contradiction. The world offers us breathtaking marvels every day, even as it warns us of its distress. I do not turn away from this truth. Instead, I choose to hold both realities at once: to celebrate what remains and mourn what is being lost. My art is not an escape from the climate crisis, but a response to it - a way to stay present, to feel deeply, and to remember what we stand to lose and what is worth fighting for.
Beauty, in this context, is not naive. It is resistance.
Artist’s Biography
Dale Bonaventure Dolejsi was born in 1972, in Seattle, Washington, where he grew up playing baseball and doodling.
As a high school sophomore on a field trip to New York City, he was hooked by Jeff Koons, Robert Ryman, and John Singer Sargent all in the same day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He thought, “I should be doing that.” Since then, a daily awareness of art and its possibilities guided him to educate himself and others in the visual arts.
During his time at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, Dolejsi encountered his first formal art class. When he was drafted and then played professional baseball as a junior, his art career was paused until he returned to finish his undergraduate degree earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1996. He knew that the next step was making and showing artwork while being a teacher professionally. He received a fellowship to attend Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California earning his Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking in 1998.
Immediately after Claremont, Dolejsi started working for Sidney Felsen and Stanley Grinstein at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, California for much of the next decade where he became a curator and collections manager working with eminent artists including Elizabeth Murray, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, Ed Ruscha, and David Hockney.
In 2006, Dolejsi moved with his wife to the Big Island of Hawaii where he began a family and his teaching career, eventually moving to his wife’s hometown of Honolulu where he continued in education until returning home to Seattle in 2014, when he took his current position as an instructor of art at Kennedy Catholic High School.
Looking for a wider footprint to influence and educate future artists in the Pacific Northwest, Dolejsi returned to academia, and will receive his Master of Fine Arts in Arts Leadership from Seattle University in 2026, with the goal of stepping up from direct education in a classroom to developing larger programs within the community.