|
Anthem of the Sun 2007
Throughout
this period I continued to draw from the human figure and also made a
series of large paintings on the theme of the book as object, pictorial
formality and totem. I showed these at Imperial College and Swiss Cottage
Library in 1981.
The
80s was a strange decade for me. Some people made a lot of money but I was
not one of them. As well as painting I worked as a furniture removal man,
a schoolteacher and in 1985, a year after leaving my job at St Martin’s,
Ros and I became directors of the Mendip Painting Centre.
The late 80s was my
‘Pot Period’, as it became known in the family; I produced a lot of
coloured pencil drawings, watercolours and acrylics on the theme of
vessels – teapots, cups, dishes etc., mostly from imagination and
memory. I had some small success with these, selling several through the
now defunct Camden Galleries in London’s Parkway. But by the early 90s I
had become more concerned with observation and immediate response to
things observed; colour and line had become the unifying agents in the
struggles with changing light, mood and movement.
An
expedition to Australia in 2000 marked a high point in my career as far as
painting out in front of the motif was concerned, despite the problems of
lugging large quantities of materials, A1 folder and easel by ’plane and
Land Cruiser into the outback. The results sold well from shows in London,
Bath and here in Winscombe
However, two trips to
Brazil in 2004 produced a much more unexpected result with a return to
working from memory and imagination. At the end of that year I began a
particularly productive period making paintings on the theme of food,
meals, eating and drinking, which gradually evolved in 2006 away from the
restraint of the rectangle into a series of cutouts on the same theme.
This too has shifted and my current work is much more ‘abstract’. If
there are images in this work they arrive from the viewers’ imagination
and associations. I’m trying to be simple. I’m making things to be
looked at as they are, rather than try to make things that look like
something else.
David
Cuthbert March 2007
|
