True Blue
Artist David Florimbi finds inspiration within
Artist David Florimbi in his studio.
Written by Lorie Porter
Photographs by Dewey Nicks
One of the most striking aspects of artist David Florimbi’s work is his use of the color blue. “It’s a tonal resonance that’s really hard to achieve,” he says. “And once you get it, it’s like magic; then you can swim in it. It’s my chord. It’s my harmonic.” Indeed, Florimbi has plumbed the depths of the cool spectrum from deep inky indigo to brilliant icy turquoise for the past four decades. And he’s not done yet: “Yves Klein was onto something,” he says, about the artist who created the iconic color International Klein Blue. “It is a spiritual portal.”
The home’s airy living room is dominated by Florimbi’s majestic painting This Side Up (2012), oil on masonite.
Florimbi and his wife, Nancy, recently resettled from Montecito to the Santa Ynez Valley, and their bucolic ranch property includes a spacious separate building for Florimbi’s art studio. Painted entirely white, its pristine walls provide a perfect foil for the artist’s colorful canvases. It’s also an ideal setting for this chapter of Florimbi’s life, a place where he can fully devote himself to the creative process far removed from the frenetic vicissitudes of the art world.
He was born in Pennsylvania, and nothing in Florimbi’s upbringing hinted that he would end up an artist. His parents were both native Italians. “There’s no artist in the family,” he notes, “no model to follow.” Florimbi’s father worked in the defense industry, a profession that took the family to Europe for several years. They returned to the States and settled in Massachusetts when Florimbi was a teenager. When a skiing accident during his senior year in high school left him immobile for several months, Florimbi opted to take an art class, which piqued his interest. His innate talent was discovered by an inspiring teacher, who he remembers to this day: “Mrs. Chapman,” he recalls, his voice full of emotion. “She saw it.”
Florimbi went on to study fine art and English at Georgetown University and was awarded the school’s Milton Glaser Design Fellowship, which came with a cash award that enabled him to travel to the West Coast for the first time. “The West Coast made more sense to me with my European background than the East Coast did,” he says. Needing a job in order to stay in California, Florimbi got his start in television production through his girlfriend at the time, whose father was in the business. He quickly scaled the ranks of Aaron Spelling’s entertainment company, which produced iconic TV shows like The Love Boat and Dynasty. But he never gave up on his art; after working all day at the studio, Florimbi would drive to North Hollywood—where he rented space above an abandoned movie theater—to paint. Eventually the directors and agents he worked with convinced Florimbi to switch to art full time. “It was like, ‘David, I don’t want to hire you, I want to buy your paintings,’” he says. From that moment, Florimbi decided art was his life and never looked back.
He soon found himself at the white-hot center of the art world, and his solo gallery exhibitions in Los Angeles and New York were frequent sellouts from the late 1980s through the mid-2000s. Closer to home, his work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and University of California Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum.
From a critical standpoint, a HuffPost reviewer praised his landscape paintings, in which the sky seems to overwhelm the earth as “possessing a force powerful enough to slip the ground out from under your feet.” A notable piece in Vanity Fair disclosed that Florimbi’s shows were always “crammed with Industry fans.” His former colleagues in the TV world became his loyal patrons and have remained so ever since. “In terms of people who can change your life, patronage is everything,” Florimbi says.
In fact, for the past decade all of Florimbi’s work has been acquired by private collectors, modern-day Medicis who have freed him from the enormous pressure of creating a body of work for gallery shows. Describing the art world as “a contact sport,” Florimbi acknowledges that “it’s so much pressure, I’ve gotten to the place where I don’t like it as much. It’s so performative.” Even so, he’s maintained his art-world contacts and doesn’t entirely dismiss the idea of mounting a show again someday.
“I don’t draw from nature at all. I like to think about it more as being a seer than a painter; it’s coming through me.”
Back to blue: Meanwhile, Florimbi is enjoying making art in his new studio. He continues to study and admire the work of other artists, especially the Italians: “I think about Bernini a lot because he could do it all,” he says. “He could do the paintings; he could do the sculpture; he could do the architecture.”
Surprisingly, Florimbi’s landscape paintings are not based on actual places or settings. “I don’t draw from nature at all. No studio I’ve ever had had good windows. I don’t even want them.” Essentially he creates from his own interior landscape. “I like to think about it more as being a seer than a painter; it’s coming through me.”
Florimbi’s painting Racing Against Joy (2025), oil on masonite (opposite), belongs to the same series as Messenger #4 (2025), oil on masonite, featured on the cover of the Fall issue.
The Shifting Point, a retrospective of the artist’s work, will be on view at Separate Reality in the Funk Zone, Sept. 19–Oct. 12, separatereality.info
