Dan McAvey’s Brush With Nature

A landscape artist incorporates rest and healing into his paintings.

Last summer, painter Dan McAvey spent a week deep in the Sax-Zim Bog, an internationally known birding and conservation area in northern Minnesota. “The bog is dense with tons of trees and shrubs and peat moss … it’s a floating landscape,” he says. The residency brought together six artists who immersed themselves completely in the bog environment and then created work to help promote conservation efforts.

Painting outdoors there required both creativity and resilience. “It was insanely buggy,” McAvey says. He came prepared with what he describes as a “four-pronged approach” that included bug spray, full-body mosquito netting, permethrin-treated clothing and a Thermacell repellent device.

The problem-solving aspect of en plein air painting is, in fact, a big part of its joy. “How am I going to solve the problem of communicating the sounds and the smells and the experience of being out in nature on this flat, two-dimensional surface?” he asks.

Closer to home, McAvey often paints at Elm Creek Park Reserve. “We live just a couple blocks from the edge, and there are some beautiful spots along the prairie that I really love to paint,” he says. He sometimes loads his gear into a repurposed bike trailer and cycles into the park to paint. The combination of creativity, environment and movement is, he says, “a trifecta of happiness.”

McAvey describes his work this way: “I explore ideas of human connection through the genre of landscape painting.” Nature is both subject matter and metaphor. During COVID-19, he painted about isolation and hope. When his mother developed Alzheimer’s, he created work exploring memory and loss. And most recently, his art has focused on the restorative psychological effects of the outdoors.

When you speak with the Champlin artist about the landscapes he paints, you get the sense that McAvey sees nature as not only a place of beauty but a place of rest and healing. It’s an approach shaped by his lifelong relationship with the outdoors—and by a career path that has woven together psychology, education and art.

After graduating from Osseo Senior High School, McAvey attended Carleton College, where a love of helping others drew him to psychology. “For me, it was kind of a tossup between art or psychology … wanting to help people live happier lives,” he says. He ultimately majored in psychology and received a master’s degree in educational psychology from the University of Minnesota.

McAvey’s work in the years that followed centered on supporting young adults—first in mental health research and later in college residential life, including six years in Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Laura McAvey, got married. But art never faded into the background. “I always had a studio space in my apartment or home,” he says. He took drawing and painting classes whenever possible. When he and Laura returned to Minnesota in 2008, McAvey continued painting and decided to try teaching some art classes for community education departments. “I just wanted to kind of test the waters and see, is it something that I actually do enjoy?” he says. Not only did he love teaching—but his students started returning for more classes and brought their friends.

That confidence led him to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). McAvey graduated in 2022 and took the leap to making art full time. Today, he teaches at MCAD and remains deeply connected to the local arts community as a board member for the Maple Grove Arts Center. His kids, Piper, 15, and Teagan, 12, attend Osseo schools and are artists themselves. “They’re both into music and drawing and writing and creativity,” he says.

McAvey has recently focused on the concept of “soft fascination”: the gentle, meandering attention that happens naturally outside. “We spend our days in focused attention, but when we get out in nature, it’s kind of the opposite,” McAvey says. “Your mind kind of bounces from one thing to the next.” His en plein air landscape paintings are full of atmosphere and light. They invite viewers to slow down and breathe.

Last fall, McAvey exhibited new work at the 410 Project community art gallery in Mankato. He titled the show Soft Fascination, and the pieces reflected not only the landscapes that inspire him but the deeper emotional experience of being present within them.

Dan McAvey
Instagram: @danmcavey