David’s work is made by bringing together images and ideas from many different sources. It could be said that the resulting paintings form matrices of association. The paintings are also celebrations of the physical possibilities of technique and manual dexterity. Sometimes the starting point for a piece will be a collage from which a painting may evolve. Sometimes a sequence of drawings will develop, each leading to the next, the forms morphing and shifting: a drawing from a drawing from a drawing. His most recent painting, ‘Second Temptation of St Anthony at Coney Island’, went through a tremendous process including digital collage using Photoshop. The pink figure comes from a poster for a French film about the Foreign Legion. There is a wooden boy riding a bicycle which he found in the Brooklyn Museum. The interior space of the painting also derives from a massive room in the Brooklyn Museum which he has interwoven with elements from Coney Island. The section in the middle of the painting including the soldier and the fireworks comes from a paper collage called ‘The Assault’ made in 1983. The green and violet stripes result from consecutive transformations of a photograph of a nude model striped with the light from a venetian blind. The model is no longer discernible in David’s painting but the stripes were subtly altered in tone and colour using Photoshop. The source of the image of St Anthony which appears at the top of the painting was a Mexican engraving. David has transformed the grey net of the original engraving around St Anthony into gold.

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The works in this show date from two periods: 1988-92 and 2013-17. They sit well together but there are marked differences to be seen. In the late eighties and early nineties, he was rather obsessed with all sorts of ordinary, everyday vessels: cups, pots, jugs, teapots. They were partly fun; you could do things with them. And they have strong erotic possibilities, for example La Dame aux Cruches, is a painting that could be seen as an inversion of Picasso’s anthropomorphic ‘Still Life with Pitcher and Apples’ (c.1920). In Picasso’s painting there is a curvaceous jug of austere colour with a saucer and a couple of apples on top of it which immediately looks like a female torso. David chose to title his painting in French as a nod to Picasso’s work.  Another earlier work with a link to Picasso, which has not been exhibited before since David painted it in 1992, is ‘The Cubist’. A friend had given David copious collage material with which he was working at the time. He folded one piece so that the image of a horse’s head which was on the back came to the front. David decided to use that in the painting.

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‘Nouvelle Cuisine’ was painted in 1990 but it comes from a painting David made in 1971 as a student which was shown in the Mall Galleries in 1972. It is the painting which has the longest trail in the history of David’s art. It evolved from a long series of drawings, the first of which was done from a photograph that his girlfriend (now wife) Ros sent to him. It depicted a little plastic nurse’s outfit, which she found in a comic, with a metal punctured dome used for flower arranging. From this unlikely origin a series of about ninety drawings were made, each one morphed from  the previous one in a kind of graphic evolution. When the pots became the focus of his work he thought of these and went back to the drawings and used some of the imagery afresh. ‘Nouvelle Cuisine’ has two intersecting s-shapes in the bottom half, a phallic shape in the top left and a shield-like shape in the top right which derive from that early series of drawings. You could call the painting symbolic erotic.

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The title for ‘Agony in the Kitchen’ is perhaps a slightly flippant reference to a painting by Arshile Gorky, an artist who has been a very big influence on David since his student days. What interested David about Gorky’s work is how his organic imagery played with ambiguity. There was some serious analysis of Gorky’s work in the 1980s when previously overlooked photographs of the interior of his house were looked at afresh by scholars who noticed how much they could be compared to his paintings. It became apparent that a lot of his paintings which were previously seen as erotic, esoteric fairy stories, he had made from abstractions of his front room. David found this liberating and humorous when he read about it and bolstered his analogous approach of refiguring domestic, everyday objects and interiors.

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David and his wife Ros spent some months in Italy where he painted ‘Tuscan Fantasia’ in Fiesole and ‘Stage Set, San Gimagnano’. The composition of ‘Tuscan Fantasia’ echoes the church architecture of the area, also rows of cypresses are a common sight. The little Tuscan flag he saw at a festival. The picture references Roman Catholic iconography such as the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the little cherub, and the lilies David saw in the convent where they were staying. Another stay was at a monastery in St Gimagnano. Other guests there included members of the cast of Madam Butterfly, the stage set for which is depicted in David’s painting ‘Stage Set, San Gimagnano’ in front of the church. Towers behind rise into the sky like a Medieval Manhattan.

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‘Counting House’ was made about the same sort of time and developed from a series of precise pencil drawings he was working on. He drew it up with similar precision and turned it into a painting. It is a combination of architectural elements and geometric pattern, and it is different from his other paintings in that it has no figures or jugs; it is a grouping of interior spaces. The patterns are rich, medieval-looking; possibly stores of wealth, and the title references the nursery rhyme, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’.

‘Limp White Bread’ is a motif about our industrial lives, with pylons in the background and the soft barely edible rubbish occupying the foreground is being cut with a beautifully engineered knife.

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The lino cut ‘On the Shelf’ relates to three paintings of more or less the same image, which came from a nudie magazine figure superimposed into a kitchen-like environment complete with teapots and other vessels. One of the three, measuring around 70 x 90 cm, has since been sold. David likes playing with forms and sees the curious shape at the top right as a cross between the sun, a frying pan, a clock and a keyhole. There is a famous and notorious book; one of Picasso’s favourites, called ‘The Story of the Eye’ by Georges Bataille. Aside from the erotic thread of the book there are very strong recurring visual images: eggs, eyes, dishes – they reappear in different forms. You can see the relationship between them, but they are interestingly changed. This happens in two ways: through psychological association (something reminds you of something or makes you think of something); and/or producing an image which does become transformed into something else, or you actually see that happening as you look at it. This malleability appealed to Picasso as it does to David, although he doesn’t set out to consciously achieve particular associations in his work; it’s just what occurs and what he chooses to leave as he works. The buttock and thigh of the figure in ‘On the Shelf’ could also be a keyhole or phallic shape on the right-hand side. It wasn’t until looking at ‘On the Shelf’ hanging in his show at LT Gallery that David realised that the top of a teapot with its spout could also be read as an eye.

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‘Green Tea’ is just a little composition with fairly recognisable objects: a large tea pot and small cups, a purple pot with blue squiggles which is based on a pot that one of David’s students made.

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‘Lady Hamilton’s Column’ is a riff on Nelson’s Column with a transformed Trafalgar Square where teapots replace lions and jugs replace buses and the National Gallery is a heap of broken Formica. Lady Hamilton is standing shamelessly on one leg with a ribbon spiralling around it as a kind of celebration of feminine defiance.

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‘Lamentation #57’ and ‘Lamentation #60’ are from a series derived from a drawing by Rembrandt, ‘Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross’, c. 1634-35. David spent about two years on the series using different media and combinations of media: pencil drawings, pen and ink, chalk, watercolours, acrylic and oil. The two in this exhibition are hung adjacent to three other paintings, which by coincidence all have Eastern European reference. ‘Kolo’ is Czech for bicycle. David lifted the wheel image from a pile of bicycles in a photograph by Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý. In the background there is a structure and a figure (just about visible on the right-hand side) derived from a Francesca Woodman photograph. The very limited colour in the work as a whole is loosely based on Tichý’s ‘palette’. His methods were very homemade and artistically very primitive. He made his own camera and enlarger all held together with tape. Many of his photographs were not fixed properly so they are stained with strange chemical colours, but are also quite beautiful.

‘Kolo’ was accepted and hung in the Royal West of England Academy ‘Drawn’ exhibition a couple of years ago.

The title for his work ‘Chemical Change’ is taken from the song ‘Rejoyce’ by Jefferson Airplane and is pertinent to the change David’s artistic process was going through when moving on from the Lamentation series, and also to the chemical changes which occur in developing photographs. Referencing the photographs helped to shake off the series and, although he was still using a similar pictorial space for the subsequent works. The black lines in ‘Kolo’ come from the Lamentations series. It is therefore interesting that the figure in the photograph he chose to reference by Francesca Woodman is a woman in a cage.

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Hung between these two works is ‘Polish Bus Shelter’. At the time of the Solidarity campaign David had a Polish student who was able to tell him something about the tensions in Poland between the Communist authorities, the unofficial trade unions and the Catholic Church. David asked her why people reverted to the Catholic Church and she said that was the only place where they could hear the truth. Church-goers were able to exchange information among themselves. In David’s work, the bus shelter is a crappy piece of corrugated metal, juxtaposed with the vaulting of the Cathedral Częstochowa which he has turned upside down. The whole painting is a rather dubious icon of the period with a somewhat ghostly female head at the top and back of the picture and an allusion to Polish piety towards the ‘Mother of God’.

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‘Hostages to Fortune’ is a work which has the complexity of his more recent Coney Island pictures, even though it was made much earlier. There is an aspect of Hypnagogia to it; from patterns and images which form and change behind closed eyelids prior to sleep. David has watched images in dense layers continually disappearing and reappearing and been fascinated by this phenomenon since childhood. At the time he was working on this image, he was looking at religious and political propaganda. Nationalism and national costumes, religion and flowing robes, communists and muscle bound workers are clichés that carry a lot of emotion. Traditional Scottish dress can easily be parodied, but he hasn’t done that with the Scotsman in ‘Hostages to Fortune’. He has split the figure into two; one with a gun on the right and the other in front of a group of figures who derive from a Mormon painting of the disciples of Christ. This second figure is the hostage and exists in the painting symbiotically as a shadow and shrouded presence. It is unknowable. It’s wrapped up but underneath it’s non-existent. So, the figure with the gun is threatening something that doesn’t actually exist. This is the only painting from that time in which David wrestles with a kind of religious theme. He says, ‘If I had produced it [‘Hostages to Fortune’] more recently, I might have made a connection with the American bible in one hand and a gun in the other...I don’t think that was what was in my mind then’.

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‘Cerne Abbas Giant’ is a more simple painting, bringing together different elements with the well-known hill figure and one of David’s teapots.
 

‘Reading Allowed’ just happened into existence during a life drawing session and the title is a double entendre with reading aloud. It is not finished in the expected sense, but purposefully left to show initial bare drawing. The male figure with a pencil behind his ear seems either not interested or is just leaving the nude figure. It could be David himself, or the visual analogy of his decision to leave the work as it is?! He went on to make the painting ‘Quarter Past Four’ which is hanging next to it. Ros was David’s model for ‘Quarter Past Four’, having body-painted her with teapots and jugs first, as you see in the painting. The green teapot has a jaunty, sexual connotation and the same fish-shaped clock which is in the lino cut also appears. Although the view out of the window is fantastical, he would concede that it is very, very loosely based on Crook Peak.

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There is ambiguity in ‘Boots Rap’ due to the crazy amalgam of David’s pictorial furniture coming together. In front of the heel there is a kind of candy twist and immediately behind is an arch and to the left of the candy twist is the hint of an arch but made insubstantial. There are two shoes, one small one more or less complete but the big one combines with an arch, a spoon and a strap with a buckle. The flying things are a reference to the surrealist novel ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’ (which was immediately banned when it was first published in France in 1871) by Comte de Lautréamont (the pseudonym of the Uruguayan-born French writer Isidore-Lucien Ducasse). André Breton insisted that new members to the surrealist movement read passages from it aloud in the café where they met. Isidore Ducasse was a teenager when he wrote it in Paris in 1868-9. His only other known writing is ‘Les Poésies’ which presents the reader with the complete contradiction to the blasphemy and black humour of Maldoror. The vaguely phallic flying things in the sky in ‘Boots Rap’ are a reference to the winged flying octopi in Chant 2. The teapot is almost unrecognisable – it looks more like a flower with a heart, perhaps the Sacred Heart of Jesus, at the centre.

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‘The Brew’ relates to ‘Boots Rap’ and is very similar to the top section of ‘Boots Rap’ with the teapot, arch and flaming heart of tea drinkers.

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Following on from this show, David is talking of a trip to Austria in order to make work based on its many wayside shrines.