David attended the Virginia Tech College of Architecture where he received several honors as an architecture student. However, deeper interests in art never faded. He was member of the XYZ student run art gallery and the Studio Propulsid art collective. During this time he immersed himself in life drawing, and his architectural work took on a more abstract nature. Cosmological diagrams and figure drawings showing bone and muscle structure comprised most of his senior thesis project.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture, David lived in New York and San Francisco before settling in Los Angeles. He worked for Frank Gehry Architects for nearly 3 years, participating in the design of world-class museum and exhibition spaces using hand-built physical models and custom 3D software, before leaving to pursue his own career in fine art. With an interest in cultivating intuition and freedom, O‘Brien strives to integrate his highly personalized, hand crafted language with more universal forms and landscapes. From a distance, O‘Brien‘s patterns are expansive; approaching his work, however, we experience an incremental shift in our perspective, as one pushed for light years through a wormhole to get a closer look at the world and our place in it.

David currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and has begun showing his work internationally, with recent solo exhibitions in L.A. and Berlin, Germany.