David Wiseman  has been painting for over 35 years since leaving the Royal College of Art in 1975 most spent in his garden studio.  He has  taught painting in numerous art schools across the country and have exhibited widely both as an individual and in many important selected group exhibitions. These include the New Contemporaries, John Moores , Hayward Annual, R.A. Summer Exhibition, Discerning Eye, London Group Open  etc. His  individual shows include those at the Serpentine Gallery and Peterborough City Museum. He has gained various awards including Arts Council of Great Britain Award, Greater London Arts Council Award  and the John Minton Award at the Royal College of Art.  He has taken part in touring exhibitions to Germany, U.S.A., and Spain including a British Council exhibition to Aachen and tour also including Hodgkin, Auerbach, Kiff and Kossoff. He has  exhibited in important curated exhibitions in this country at The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Kettles Yard Gallery, Cambridge and the Camden Arts Centre. He has his  work in many corporate and public collections including the Arts Council of Great Britain, Prudential, The Bank of England, London Borough of Hammersmith, The Open University, Peterborough City Museum,Museo Municipal Ourense,  Barts and the London N.H.S. Trust,  Lewisham Hospital  and many more.His work is represented in private collections in all parts of the world and he has  completed 8 major public art works including large scale murals at Charing Cross, Frimley Park, Royal London and Ealing Hospitals. He was recently elected member of the National Acrylic Painters Association winning the Presidents Prize and Adrian Henri Memorial Prize in their exhibitions in St Ives and Birkenhead.  Elected to  the London Group in their centenary year 2013.

 

From initial stains of colour pooled and overpainted to saturation , through an agitation of calligraphic incidents almost amounting to automatic writing , David Wiseman stirs up his and our memory to bring to mind a sense of place that is evidently real. His landscapes are the sum of experience of summer and winter, north and south , past and present, sights and imaginings. .. a beechwood brightens into the parrot plumage of a tropical jungle; the darkness mines the depth of the forests that have now become coal. One flick of a brushstroke utters the ghost of a primeval fern and another discovers a vein of gold or a torrent of molten rock and the water comes forth like the sea.   

Larry Berryman   Arts Review

 

STATEMENT

The works on canvas are made in the studio and I also work directly from the landscape with a variety of mixed media on smaller works on paper and canvas . My painting is  inspired by particular landscape places or events using drawings, photographs and memory. Although spending a lot of time in Devon and the south coast I am equally inspired by local rivers and parklands close to my Ealing home.  When painting outside I try to convey the feeling of being part of the landscape.  I have been a keen runner for many years and most of my running is done along the riverside and canal that inspires much of my painting. This allows me to be absorbed by the landscape as I pass through it rather than seeing it as a picture postcard cut out image. I also want to instill this feeling of constant change and movement in my paintings.  They are begun in a loose, freely drawn calligraphic way using a series of marks, stains and shapes made with a wide variety of brushes, roller, scraper, sponge, etc.  The final image is slowly extracted in a playful, organic way using overlaid marks and glazes to express qualities of nature such as mood, light, colour, movement, atmosphere, space etc. I am attempting to find equivalents for the landscape in the physical qualities of paint, in order to express a feeling of flux in nature. I want the paintings to be intriguing, tantalising and ambiguous held between the plastic qualities of the paint and all the celebratory  magical illusions and evocations of the depiction of nature.

 

RUNNING AND PAINTING   for Rowley Gallery Blog

Running and painting surprisingly have much in common , the main similarity being  that they are both totally engrossing activities. Both are an integral part of my life where withdrawal symptoms occur if stopped for any length of time. They both allow me to lose myself in the struggle and sheer pleasure of the activity and forget any other pressing problems. The two activities come together in another way for me as my usual running  route is by the wooded waterside along  my local canal and much of my painting at the moment is inspired by rivers and woodland.  Running allows one to be absorbed by the landscape as it passes by rather than seeing it cut out as in a picture postcard. There are fleeting glimpses and images passing by.  It is constantly changing and moving and this is the feeling I try to express in my paintings. I try to find in the complex and seductive properties of paint equivalents for the ever changing, shifting and transient beauty of the landscape. My regular run is around five miles so the character of the canal side is frequently changing but always with the reflecting, moving and busy water at my side.  One aspect of running that differs from painting though is the inevitable slowing down with age as race times rapidly deteriorate and injuries take ages to heal whereas one hopes that the painting mellows and improves with the passing years. I am now the wrong side of 60 for running but perhaps the right side for painting !

SENSE OF SCALE   for Rowley Gallery Blog

In the past I have made a number of very large scale public artworks including a ceiling mural at Charing Cross Hospital which was 10 x 6 metres and a mural for the special care baby unit at Frimley Hospital 10 x 2  metres. Most of my current studio paintings are over a metre long but I am now embarking on a series  of small paintings 10 x 12 inches. It is interesting to see how such changes of scale affect painting methods. The most obvious difference is how much of the body s used. During the making of the large murals, made in panels and begun on the studio floor my arm would not reach the centre of the canvas so I had to go onto the canvas with bare feet. Marks and gestures were very large involving wide movements. I also used other  means of applying the paint as well as brushes such as rollers, sponges  etc. The idea being to retain painterliness without becoming mechanical due to the large scale.

 My current studio landscape  works  are large enough to involve the gestures of hand and arm .  I am trying to allow the paint to  mirror the change and movement in the landscape.  Again these are begun on the floor before moving to wall or easel. The current series of very small paintings was prompted by an exhibition I am organising for my students where all the work will be  identical 12” x 10”. This has been a challenge I have really enjoyed and been surprised by. Now the paintings are largely made with hand and fingers but still aiming to keep the fluidity of the larger works. They can be made more quickly in a more relaxed way as it easier to consign them to the dustbin if things go wrong.  Going wrong on the little pictures seems to always involve overworking and it’s the ones that work quickly that are the best. I aim to make around 20 small pictures before returning to a larger size and will be interested to see how the larger pictures are affected by having worked on a smaller scale.