Dilan Conniff

Group Shows

" Venice Family Clinic Art Auction" Venice family clinic May 16 2026 Venice CA
"Soft Serve" Good Mother Gallery Nov. 15 2025 Los Angeles CA 
"Trail Mark, Bog Town Roadwork" Lonestar Projects Sep. 20 2025
"Boulders" Arcane Space May 16 2025 Venice CA 
" Cave Dwellers: Artifacts of the Present" Stone/Age Pop up gallery Nov. 9 2024

Gleb: You’re painting images that already exist - screenshots, fan art, avatars from online communities. What does it feel like to be a hand in that chain? Is the painting an act of preservation, transformation, or something else entirely?

Dilan: Recreating images is the main concept of my work. I started painting furries in 2023 and became interested in the act of repetition itself. Rather than creating a new image, I'm recreating something that already exists and building a different relationship with it through painting it.
I see the work as both preservation and transformation. The original image stays intact, but by translating it into a painting it becomes a physical object.The paintings are less about any individual reference and more about the process of reproduction itself—an image existing in an ongoing chain of copies. I maintain the repetition by using the same scale, materials, subject, and always getting my references online tracing them with a grid method. Turning the paintings into a sort of infinite object for me, or a value of infinity. 

Gleb: Masks in human culture have always marked a threshold - carnival, ritual, myth - where the ordinary self is temporarily suspended. But furry culture seems to invert this logic entirely: the mask isn’t where you become someone else, it becomes where you become more yourself. Does your painting accept that inversion, or does it still hold onto the older idea that something is being hidden?

Dilan: My work definitely accepts the idea that a mask can make someone more themselves. What interests me is the contradiction. Someone can create a character, become that character, and still be expressing something authentic without hiding or trying to escape reality. I feel like furries create there own reality and have such a big loving community to support it. Going to Furcons reminds me a lot of going to punk shows growing up.
At the same time, I don't think the mystery completely disappears. I like that tension, and I think my paintings leave room for both readings.

Gleb: Your paint handling is rough, almost urgent - these aren’t clean illustrations of the characters, they’re wrestled onto the surface. Why does that friction matter to you? What would be lost if the painting looked like what it depicts?

Dilan: It's funny because when I first started this work I was thinking that I would paint these images as realistic as possible. Before this, I spent years making abstract paintings, and some of that language carried over naturally. I realized that I just wanted the painting to be legible enough, and ended up painting them more crude and loose.I also really love the idea of something being legible enough to be a "good painting" while being painted crudely. I also study a lot of James Ensor, Degas, and Renior and try to carry some of that sensibility into my paintings while using a limited primary color pallette.