The following text was written about about my work by Andrew Renton in 2019
It’s about a desire to possess things or capture them when you know the object of your gaze and desire cannot be grasped. It’s about fandom, which is an elevated form of identification, observation and even time travel.
These sources, collaged together like the back of your old school notebook insist that such imagery, in a digital age, is perpetually present, and belongs to all of us. A shared knowledge and collective ownership. And what does it mean to copy the already copied?
The artist can’t help his gaze. Not always a preliminary model towards a more fleshed out version, the drawing can also reclaim territory that has long been worked out, over-worked, even, and iconic. It rethinks its origins, putting the viewer back into the frame. It’s almost a readymade and comes with baggage. History brought into the present tense. It makes me think about what Kierkegaard said about repetition; that it was a kind of recollection forwards. And nothing less than an ethical engagement.
(And perhaps I should mention that the Fall are my favourite band of all time.) Andrew Renton 2019
David Powell – The Band Paintings
– Since 2018 I’ve been making work about the British alternative music scene. Many of the bands I’m interested in were given a platform on John Peel’s radio show, if they got too famous he’d usually stop playing them, after all it was about giving exposure to unknown and new forms of music at the margins of the mainstream. My emotional connection with these bands began in my teens at a time when my only goals were to go to art school and see as many bands as possible.
Desire plays an enormous role in my work, years of going to concerts, feeling the build up of an electric atmosphere as I wait for the band to come on stage, the objects of my desire forever just out of reach. My identity was shaped by these experiences and unconventional sounds that flourished in the independent music scene . Art is a kind of time travel, fandom a perpetual state of collective identification and joy.
At it’s core my work explores collective memory while embracing social dynamics that strives to bring different audiences together.
The Flower Paintings
Many years ago Jean Luc Godard referred to flowers on the periphery of highways as roadside refugees, I find a strikingly beautiful familiarity with that comment, it is so poignant. In 2013 I began to replace human figures in my compositions with flowers and plants, it was strange to do so and totally exciting to claim a space that is predominantly populated by representations of humans beings in painting for centuries, it opened up all kinds of possibilities, climate change, survival, the social context filtered through parallel worlds, of hope and raising awareness via different channels.