statement & biography

FREE RANGE 2010

biography

david hunt

2007-2010

Jun 2010

Mar 2009

Feb 2009

Jul 2008

Jun 2007

Feb 2007

Dec 2006

USA, UK.

Madcap Theatre, Wolverton, MK.

Borough Council of Wellingborough.

The focus of my work is paradigmatically concerned with nature and landscape, but it is also a paradox between the built and natural environment.

With an ever decreasing source of sublime landscape upon our doorsteps, from which to escape the hum-drum of day to day life, it is increasingly difficult to feel captivated by nature’s landscapes with the encroachment of the built environment upon it. It is increasingly difficult to find a place where one can meditate upon the mysteries of life and death.

The subject matter of my painting might seem to be landscape or nature; however it goes beyond this simplistic way of viewing it and is inherently complicated to describe, just as it would be to describe the cognitive experience and duality of culture versus nature. It is too simple to say that I paint trees, water or rocks. I paint all, but yet I paint none of these and for this reason I cannot say landscape, nature, trees, rocks or any naturally occurring physical anomaly is my subject matter.

It is because of this ambiguity of subject, that I feel compelled to avoid creating physical likenesses of places, but to concentrate more on the experience of conflicting cultural and natural environments, which inform me of their presence.

My source material predominantly derives from arboreal environments, which I record with photography, sketch making, and through the internalisation of personal experience. Though I am beginning to find that by filtering architectural forms of the built environment into my current work, which is predominantly, concerned with nature based forms, I am moving closer to the paradoxical and paradigmatic perceptions of the conflict between nature and culture that I have been trying to develop over the past ten years.

The physicality of the environment, I interpret as being the ‘figure’ and the experience of the environment as being the ‘ground’. So when I am painting, I am aiming to tune my conscious to a point of creativity between these two anomalies. The result is that my painting is in limbo; somewhere between representation and abstraction, somewhere between the physical world and the subconscious mind.

Artists that I draw influences from are Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, JMW Turner, Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman, Gerhard Richter and Ian McKeever. I consider my work to engage with all these artists, but perhaps more widely, I am influenced by Northern Romanticism in general and it is my concern to quantify the tradition within a 21st century perspective of it…

I feel that my painting is on the verge of discovering a maturity, which I am excited to develop in my masters degree year 2010-2011 and confident that my resulting work will both intrigue and raise questions about the contemporaneousness of Romanticism.