David Jones Paintings

Cut Through. 2009. Acrylic on board. 73x83cm.

I first met David in 1982 at what was then Middlesex Polytechnic. I was starting a Diploma in Higher Education and David was in the second year of the two-year course. It was a modular course, and we had both signed up for the Fine Art Unit as our primary study programme under the remarkable tutelage of Maurice Blik. I was struck by David’s raw expressionist approach to painting. His work at that time reminded me of a kind of hybrid style that could have included Bonnard and Beckman, a sweet and sour source if you like.

Mujer Naranja. 1990. Oil on Canvas. 183x142cm.

 My recollection/interpretation of the subject matter was like I was watching a painting version of a kitchen sink drama. I can’t find any of these works online right now but my memory of them was of tightly constrained and distorted home interiors populated by tense characters. This tension was to some extent resolved by the vivid and energised colour and paint application. David commented at one point on his use of ‘acid colours’. I took this to mean not only the astringently citrous greens, oranges and yellows but also the nuanced hallucinatory imagery.

Flowers. Oil on board. 120 x 80 cm.

Garages and Car. 2012. Acrylic on board. 72x83cm.

 David’s later paintings of suburban landscapes with the parked cars and privet hedges extended and refined the earlier works. The hallucinatory qualities remain but the colours have become more restrained and selective. The blues though have a deep intensity drawing the viewer into a shared visual subtext; invisible crocodiles could be hiding in the bushes furtively waiting for a passerby. The glazes function for me like a barrier between perception and the painting subject matter, simultaneously separating and connecting personal subjectivity with image subjectivity; another great way David finds to generate tension and resolution. He achieves a similar effect with the wallpaper overlays, meditative compositions resembling the experience of mindful periods being interrupted by spontaneous memories and triggered thoughts.

Strong Secret World. Oil on Board. 120 x120 cm.

This dynamic that David achieves via ‘still’ imagery is transferred later to film. Poignant documentary footage reconfiguring memory fragments into streams of contemplative consciousness. I am reminded of two other filmmakers David Lynch and David Cronenberg in addition to the painters Max Beckman and Pierre Bonnard. The cinematic similarities lie more in DJs paintings than in his films though, the concentration of mood via intensely focussed and lingering gaze perhaps.  Despite all the old white blokes mentioned here, David has his own unique identity as an artist and is deserving of greater recognition of his inspirational, imaginative vision.