David Hayward
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David Hayward spent his early years in rural mid-Wales before studying art at Cheltenham, Canterbury, Brighton and the Royal College. He was a Professor & Deputy Head of College at the University for the Creative Arts and Professor of Visual Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University. David left academia in 2009 to pursue his own creative practice and has a studio in the Kent Downs. His work is held in numerous private collections.
David is primarily an abstract painter but uses his interest in the morphology of landscape and the peculiarities of specific locations to inform his work. In his most recent body of work, this translates as a painterly contemplation on the marginality of shorelines and estuaries with their horizontal delineations of air, water and land and the transient nature of weather, erosion and the detritus of tidelines. But, rather than depict these places topographically, he uses them to explore how such physicality and transience might be reflected through the qualities and colour of a painting’s surface.
It is an interest in surface qualities that led David to use encaustic as his primary medium. The process allows him to manipulate surfaces by incising and scraping away layers to reveal underpainting, or by embedding discarded fragments from earlier work back into a painting’s surface. These acts of burying and excavating, embedding and revealing, offer painterly parallels to the way landscape contains evidence of its own formation. -
Encaustic is a process that involves dissolving pigment into molten wax. The earliest known examples if its use are Greek and Egyptian, dating back over 3,000 years. After the fall of the Roman empire, encaustic fell into relative obscurity. Egg tempera and later, oil paint, were cheaper and easier to use and thus became encaustic’s successors. The 20th century saw a resurgence of encaustic and it has been used by Diego Rivera, James Ensor and, most notably, the American artist Jasper Johns.
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Materialise Exhibition (with Su Jameson) - May 7th - June 7th 2021
Materialise is an exhibition that celebrates two artists who consider materials to be central to their practice.
For David Hayward, the paintings in this exhibition reflect his love of the landscape and his interest in formal abstraction. Even at their most abstract, his intention is to evoke a sense of place. Pictorial decisions about colour, surface and structure are invariably informed by memories of specific locations, yet leave room for the viewer to find a resonance of their own. His encaustic images are built up in layers, often cut into, overpainted and scraped back to reveal traces of earlier marks - a process that allows visual accidents to occur and unexpected connections to be made.
Included in the show are exclusive selections from his Notebook, View from a Train, and Saints & Sinners series.
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