David O'Connor FRSA

David was born in Birkenhead in 1959. He gained a first class degree in Fine Art at Sunderland and was awarded a 2 year postgraduate scholarship at the Slade School of Fine Art London. He lives in The Wylye Valley on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire.
He is predominantly a landscape painter influenced by John Sell Cotman and Paul Nash. He exhibits with galleries in London, Dublin, The Cotswolds, Wiltshire and California. His work is in numerous collections in the UK and internationally.
The Work
David makes paintings which explores the joy and confusion of fragments of memories of a place. The memory of the journey there and the journey back at the same time. The map, the aerial view and the reconstruction. Exploring more layering and overpainting interests me currently. As previously they are painted from memory, sketches, photographs and imagined spaces.. There is also an element of time or change built into the paintings almost as if the different years, different walks are recorded in the one image.
His paintings are built up of many layers of paint almost like the archaeology of the Plain. He paints, then scrape back through the layers and build up more: constantly constructing, deconstructing, overlapping, obscuring and revealing until the right emotion and composition is captured. As they are based more on emotional memory, the compositions are not planned but evolve in the painting process. His clients identify the paintings with the places not in a literal tree for tree way but in the overall spirit of place.

The still life paintings follow on from his previous still life work but explore the use of flattening and pattern making found in his landscapes. He says he wanted to push the vibrancy and the feel good factor in the composition, colour and patterns.
The series is inspired by a very wide range of artists including Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Andre Derain, Euan Euglow, Paul Nash, Degas, and Larry Rivers. Also contemporary artists such as Bruce Mclean, Anna Hymas, Alison Dickson, Chloe Lamb and Jonas Wood.
Japanese art is also inspirational in the way it flattens and unfolds perspective.
Ultimately they are made to be joyous and life affirming in the most simple way.