Daven Anderson

Executive Director of MoWS (Missouri Watercolor Society) 

Daven’s work is in the permanent collections of nine US Museums, the United States Naval Academy,  the Unites States Coast Guard and countless private and foundation collections.  He has exhibited world-wide and won many awards.  He is the current Executive Director of the Missouri Watercolor Society and the former Managing Director of the American Society of Marine Artists.  He has taught art on the college level and teaches watercolor and oil painting in workshops and weekly in his studio.  He is represented by McCaughlin & Burr, the oldest gallery (1840) west of the Mississippi.  

Daven, a US Naval Academy graduate with an MBA from the University of Chicago, a nuclear engineer and submariner with thirty-five years running companies, came late to a full-time art career.  In 2010 it became his passion.  He is self-taught having followed a path of very occasional workshops and much trial and error.  He has painted in all mediums but now works exclusively in oil and watercolor and in a wide range of subject matter.  Daven is a representational painter.

His largest body of work is his series of sixty-five paintings on our nation’s navigable waters: THE RIVERS: A Celebration of Life and Work on America’s Waterways.  His ‘Rivers’ paintings carry the viewer to the very banks of America’s greatest waterways and beyond, into shipyards, onto docks, aboard ships, and on our swift broad currents. Daven earned special access by virtue of his status as a US Coast Guard artist, a graduate of the US Naval Academy and, formerly, as the Managing Director of the American Society of Marine Artists.  The series was exhibited in seven US Museums over four years and was supported by a 144 page full color exhibition catalog.  

Daven and his River series was honored on March 24, 2017 when he received the prestigious Donald T. Wright Award.    The Award is presented biennially by the Herman T. Pott National Inland Waterway Collection of the St. Louis Mercantile Library and Art Museum in recognition of a body of work that contributes significantly to a better understanding of the American inland waterways.  

Parisian Reflections