David Storey

About the Artist

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Threadneedle Prize finalist David Storey is a British figurative painter. His psychologically charged paintings are an exploration of memory, with half-remembered people and places emerging from complex layers of texture and colour. 

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David says, 'An idea can come from anywhere: TV, books, the internet etc. I then embark on a process of unlocking the idea through a series of sketches and experiments. This journey of development and discovery can take anything from 5 days to 5 years until a kind of alchemy takes place and things seem to harmonise of their own accord in a way that can be very rewarding.

I paint in an expressionistic way using rags and sponges because the physical marks and textures are a fundamental element of what I am trying to achieve. The challenge for me though is to retain an economy of execution – an effortless effort.

Richard Unwin writing about David's work:

"Sharing in their fragility, the characters Storey depicts are aware they stand on the edge, but they are aware too that we who look on them are also fragile. The blurred faces gaze out as if to ask if we who exist now have forgotten those who went before and if we believe our experiences today are really unique; the couples trapped in tension stand as a mirror to all relationships, while the most haunting characters come as associates of Ebenezer's ghosts, ready to awaken us to who we truly are."

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

"My paintings are an exploration of memory. They offer glimpsed or half-remembered figures and faces – 're-imagined ancestors' recovered from a personal archive of the forgotten.

I come from West Cumbria, which is an isolated, bleak coastal plain, welded onto the side of the Lake District. The municipal buildings and churches are mainly Victorian and built of sand stone that turns black when it rains... and it rains an awful lot there. This melancholy and primordial world is the one that often features in my work.

Wherever possible I paint using my fingers, palette knives and rags instead of brushes, I achieve a much more expressive result and find I can create a fuller range of tones, colours, textures and lines working this way."

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