About

David Normal is a painter, animator, and installation maker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He got his start in the mid-1980s making fliers for the Bay Area hardcore punk scene. In 1989 he declared himself a “Crazyologist”, an art philosophy of cracked logic and applied insanity that he developed throughout his life and work.

In the 1990s Normal began building large-scale work for the Burning Man Festival, and collaborated closely with Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, contributing key concepts and themes to the burgeoning festival.

In the 2000s David Normal began experimenting with painting on translucent media such as silk to create lightboxes. This became The Illuminations, highly detailed oil paintings that were printed large format and mounted on edge-lit Plexiglas. The Illuminations installation consisted of these glowing double-sided lightboxes in a dark room. Exhibitions took place in San Francisco, New York, Berlin, and Los Angeles between 2010 and 2013.

In 2015 his paintings were the subject of a solo exhibition at the British Library in London, Crossroads of Curiosity. In 2019 he created Cathenge, a cat-temple for Burning Man that the San Francisco Arts Commission later presented as public art at Patricia’s Green in Hayes Valley, San Francisco, where it stood from October 2022 through March 2024.

He now works from a studio in West Oakland devoted to painting, 3D printing, and installation art. Normal also travels frequently to video document rituals of spirit possession in Indonesia, Thailand, and Latin America.