Dax van Aalten was born in Clearwater, Florida in 1973. Van Aalten works predominantly in the medium of painting but also works with sculpture and photography. Van Aalten moved from Tennessee to Los Angeles in 1995 and exhibited with Cannibal Flower, an underground art movement as well as other galleries. Van Aalten moved to New York City in 2002 where he lived and worked until 2013. Now, once again a Tennessean, Van Aalten maintains a studio east of Nashville in the Cookeville area. He has had solo shows in New York City at Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden and Pocket Utopia, as well as several group shows including Gallery Zurcher in Paris, France. Van Aalten was a Fellows in Residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in 2014.

Thoughts often come and go and some thoughts seem to come from nowhere, or perhaps the ether. My paintings are like a recording in a journal of the subconscious. Not knowing where the imagery comes from, I try to wrestle with the constant uncovering to come to some sort of aesthetic compromise. The elements are entrenched into the subconscious level and acting on their own, independent of any conscious desires. I start each painting with quick, sporadic subconscious movements, pure abstraction of color and line, which searches for a place to land and a direction to emerge. These paintings seem to come from a hidden world, through a wall, only to be contained on the canvas as a specimen of abstract thought.