Thursday, October 15, 2009

David Price exhibit



We are pleased to announce our latest exhibit...acrylic paintings by Langley's own David Price.  Come see his work...it is really amazing.  He can be contacted at dflat@flatrockproductions.com

Artist's statement:  A man working in a field…A lone, abandoned farmhouse set high in a field…A woman in a café, waiting for someone….A street sweeper leaning against a worn and peeling wall, centuries old…An old family portrait from the early 1900’s, their faces stern and familiar, the dress formal, the characters posed…the sun setting between two distant hills, a cluster of very familiar farm buildings in the foreground. What is the common thread? Buildings that belong. People that belong. They belong in their surroundings. They are so entwined with their landscape that it is sometimes difficult to separate one from the other.

 To create my paintings, I assemble images in my mind…a man sitting in a café in Paris, the rolling hills of farmland, a dozen shades of yellow, a glass of wine on a café table, the wall of an abandoned farmhouse, weathered and peeling, the layers of color telling a story of the passage of time and the hands that created that surface. I am also inspired by architecture. Not only architecture with a big A”, the cathedrals, monuments, opera houses and the like, often associated with great architecture; but especially architecture with a small a”; the simple, comfortable, common structures. It is a combination of these things that are the building blocks for my paintings. Sometimes I work literally and paint portrait style, sometimes color and texture are enough to evoke the spirit, essence, and history of a place.


Over the past 16 years, I have developed a unique technique to express these ideas using acrylic paints on a gypsum surface. I incise, scratch, run, and work the surface, layering colors to create a sense of age. Like sketching with a pen, each mark in the surface will always be there, a step in the process, a mark in time. This technique allos me to work quickly and spontaneously. I make few,
if any, preparatory sketches, instead allowing the images to flow onto the surface, to take on a life of their own, to have an unpretentious grace, an ease and certain comfort.