10+ Years Experience
David Buetsche
Contemporary Artist focused on Coastal Ruinism
Available For:
Custom Commission, Collaboration, Licensing, Fundraiser Donations, Selling Existing Work, Social Practice, Teaching / Residency, Live Performance
Copy Artist Email Address
Artist Email Address Copied!
About the Artist
My practice centers on Coastal Ruinism, a language of structure, erosion, and quiet failure. Using paint, collage, and salvaged materials such as wood, rope, and industrial fragments, I construct surfaces that carry tension before allowing them to break down. The process is both deliberate and subtractive. What remains is not an image, but a condition.Alongside this work, my SHAPE/WRECK series explores similar ideas through collage. Using archival maritime imagery, I fragment and reassemble boats, coastlines, and figures into unstable compositions. These works focus less on structure and more on memory, where images surface, erode, and partially disappear.
Across both bodies of work, horizons, vessels, and architectural forms emerge as remnants rather than fixed subjects. Each piece operates as a record of pressure over time, shaped by forces of weather, navigation, and human intervention.
This is not about depicting the coast.
It is about what remains after it.
Recovery Line centers on a single rope under tension, stretched across a worn, atmospheric field. The line suggests both connection and strain, a fragile attempt at holding something together. The work reflects on repair as a temporary condition, where balance is maintained just before failure.
"Recovery Line" (2026)
Mixed Media, Collage and Dock Line on Canvas
60 in. W x 40 in. H
Where the River Forgot to End holds a landscape in suspension, where movement continues but resolution never arrives. The river extends without closure, suggesting a system that carries forward beyond its intended boundary.
"Where the River Forgets to End" (2026)
Mixed Media on Wood Panel
40" in. W x 30" H in.
Cemented Spirit is formed through weight, buildup, and erosion. The figure emerges and fractures simultaneously, held together by material rather than definition. It suggests endurance as something worn, not preserved.
"Cemented Spirit" (2026)
Mixed Media, Cement and Acrylic on Canvas
60 in. W x 48 in. H
SHAPE/WRECK explores the point where identity breaks into form and form collapses into memory. Fragmented imagery is held in tension with open space, where the figure is both revealed and interrupted. The composition resists completion, allowing absence to carry as much weight as presence.
The work considers how we construct ourselves from partial histories, and how those constructions inevitably erode.
"Shape/Wreck" (2026)
Collage and Drawing on Manila
18 in. W x 12 in. H
Jesse Stahl draws from archival imagery to reframe a figure often left at the margins of history. The rider is pulled forward through layered paint, collage, and interruption, where image and surface compete for control. Portions remain clear while others dissolve, suggesting how memory is constructed, obscured, and revised over time.
The work resists a fixed narrative. Instead, it holds the tension between visibility and erasure, asking what is preserved, what is lost, and who is allowed to remain.
"Jesse Stahl" (2026)
Mixed Media, Collage and Acrylic on Canvas
48 in. W x 48 in. H
(Part of the Bader+Simon Gallery Collection)