David Addison Small's distinctive, precisely rendered Renaissance-style oil and egg tempera paintings depict what the artist calls"Grounded Angels", quasi-Biblical fiqures characterized by patriachal beards, powerful,rooster-like red wings, and full, rounded bellies. Small, speaking to The Banner on the phone from Boston said these unclothed fiqures "are very earthy,very human" as they smoke cigars and drink wine in the countryside.

Small's peaceful Buddha-like angels can be seen as quiet revolutionaries, their singular vision of male beauty adding a different dimension to idealizations of the male fiqure as powerfully muscled.

Susan Rand Brown
Arts and Entertainment
The Provincetown Banner, August 11,2005

TOO REALISTIC,TOO NAKED,TOO REVEALING. THANK GOD.
The images are startling in their strangeness and simplicity: man, naked, with the soft flesh, ample bellies, and wings of cherubs; white-haired and bearded men as jovial and benevolent-looking as Santa Claus puffing on thick cigars, as content and clubby as members of an old-boy social club.

David Addison Small's newest paintings are at once joyous and eccentric, humorous and intimate, surprising and tender. Beautifully drawn, with detail and precision, the work makes clear Small's extrordinary technical skill. But this series of paintings also displays his sensibilities, his passions, and his spirit. They are lovely and loving images to behold.

In one painting, two of the winged men dance together with delicately-rendered expressions of sublime joy on their faces. In another, they light cigars at a table set with candles in an airy, open forest, as if ready to discuss business, or just sit back and relax. Another painting depicts a man, soft flesh making him at once fatherly and childlike, sitting on a rock and playing a fiddle.

"Miniature Small,"a show that will highlight 10 of the artist's newest paintings, most of which are 8 by 10 inches in size, along with five of his larger canvases completed in the last few years, will open July 31 at the Musselman Gallery. It's Small's first solo show in Provincetown in 10 years.

Using oil and egg tempera and adding a varnish that adds a soft sheen to his painting's already un-earthly qualities, Small's new work continues his interest and expertise in Renaissance-style painting and impressionism. A student of Ernst Fuchs in Vienna and Gregory Gillespie in the U.S., Small's work combines seductive and quirky imagery to create paintings traditional in style but, highly personal in content. "Oak," for instance, depicts the artist himself as a stark and slender fiqure rising from a tree, arms extended into a rich, fiery sky. He's surrounded by the adoring, nurturing fiqures of the rotund winged men (his muses?). The painting echoes mythology and religious imagery, but is also about art and creation.

Gallery owner Lee Musselman, himself an artist known for eccentricity and imagination, has been supportive and enthusiastic about Small's work ever since Small had a show at the East End Gallery in Provincetown. Small is amused at the idea of his paintings being prominently displayed in a town, in the summer at least, as a haven for buff and bronzed gay men. In many ways, his paintings are an analoque to Ruben's sensual renditions of the ample female form. Small's work is a celebration of the reverse gay male aesthetic that finds beauty in burly men known as "bears." The men in Small's paintings are not beautiful by contemporary cultural standards. But their lush shapes, so exquisitely drawn, have an eroticism that is appealing simple because it is so natural, yet so rarely seen in modern art. These men loom large, literally and fiquratively.

Thomas Garvey
ArtsMedia Summer 2000

Cryptic' is the appropiate name of Boston painter David Addison Small's 20 year retrospective at UMass-Boston.

Small's work is complex and mysterious in imagery, full of earthbound, overweight angels who puff on cigars and people turning into trees. His technique is, also unusual:He uses a mix of egg tempera and oil, just like his predecessors did in the 15th century. His fantasies are personal,impossible to unravel, but he allows interpretive leeway."I dissolve the narratives of the the pieces like sugar in water so the art of free-association is made available to the viewer,"he writes in the brochure for the show.

Christine Temin
Critic's Tip
Boston Globe  January 14,1999

David Addison Small's angels are white-bearded fellows, nudes with ample bellies who puff on stogies. He populates his "Angeli Terrae" show at the Kougeas Gallery with these grounded angels,and they are earthy not only in their heft but in their pure sensual indulgence. They combine the beneficense of Santa Claus with the self-satisfaction of an old-style capitalist like J.P.Morgan.

It's hard not to be seduced by the artist's mythology, which anchors the spiritual in the senses. His most recent work,"Flesh and Feathers"includes a self-portrait in which Small, lean and nude,closes his eyes as his two guardian angels,each grasping a cigar, lean down toward him to whisper in either ear. These bears are the artist muses, and "Flesh and Feathers" shows us  the blessing that is the moment of creative inspiration.

Excerpts from a review by Cate McQuaid
Living/Arts
Boston Globe Sept.26,1996