David O'Connor

After achieving a first class degree in Fine Art, David spent two years at the Slade School of Art, completing a post graduate diploma.  Since then he has combined a successful career as a sculptor and painter with numerous solo shows, residencies and commissions with a career in teaching in further education, mainly in the South West.  His distinctive paintings are informed by the Wiltshire and Dorset landscape.  He says of his work:

“The paintings are direct and intuitive. They are an attempt to combine topographical information with an awareness of pattern and abstraction within Wiltshire and Dorset landscapes. 

Much of my work is not a single point of view image: it is constructed from different information including reference to the means of production such as cartography, astronomy, surveying and perspective.

Measurement, time and the movement of the heavens are all evident when one moves through a landscape. Cast shadows, the arc of the sun and moon and the constancy of the Northern Star are all persistent elements within the landscape. These are scientific and mystical at the same time. In landscapes; particularly places like Wiltshire I feel a strong sense of history: walking the same soil and looking at the same sun and moon as the people who built Stonehenge.

Much of the work is not directly representational in the traditional sense. The world is an infinitely beautiful place but I believe it is beyond representation what we do as artists is remind people of this by alluding to the sublime nature of our existence. The work is poetry not prose.

I am inspired by a long line of landscape artists going back to John Sell Cotman, William Blake, and Samuel Palmer, Continuing into the 20th century with the painters Paul Nash, Euan Uglow, the filmmaker and painter Peter Greenaway and the filmmaker and my tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art: Chris Welsby.”