As a teenage art student in Canterbury, and later at the Slade, my work was all figurative. I associated landscape with painting out of doors, which didn’t attract me.  

At the age of 30 I held my first one-man exhibition, in Zimbabwe. It was expressionist figuration. That trend continued after I returned to Canterbury in 1979, having completed demanding art-history commitments in Nigeria.  

I could now take up painting again in earnest, and regularly cycling in the Kentish countryside generated a love of “poetic landscapes” that has contributed to my imaginative abstracts “tending towards landscape” (Jackie Wullschläger, commenting on a GV Art show of mine).

I have occasionally taken up figuration again and that is the theme of this first GV Art online show of mine. As for the ambiguous relationship of people in these paintings, and the multiple faces in some of the heads, these were all introduced to convey what I feel from time to time when looking at something in front of me. 

The visual reality on one hand is accompanied by another reality in the relationship of individual objects to each other that creates a sense of enigma. For me there's poetry in that and I need to express it.

It's a powerful feature I respond to in the work of the artist Giorgio de Chirico: "What shall I love if not the enigma?" 
I like that.

David Heathcote

September 2020

For further information please visit artist’s page: David Heathcote

For pricing & purchase enquiries please email: Robert@gvart.co.uk