Exactly 30 years ago I curated, and wrote a book, about The Brotherhood of Ruralists, a group of painters who, unmoved by the tide of Minimalist and Conceptualist Art sweeping across the country during the early 70s from both America and Europe and inspired by the poetic and visionary feelings embodied in the work of Blake, Palmer, Nash and Spencer among others, looked to establish renewed confidence in an English Romantic tradition. However, when you do books and exhibitions like this, on neglected or disregarded groups or figures, you hope, but sadly rarely ever know, whether people, above all artists, will pick up at all on the ideas you are trying to get across in them. So it was, with huge pleasure therefore, that I received an e-mail from David Piddock just before this exhibition (via the gallery as I’d never met him) to say that it was after reading my Brotherhood of Ruralists book in 1981 he’d said to himself, “…yes this was what I want to be – a cross between Samuel Palmer and Stanley Spencer, painting mystical landscapes in my very own ‘valley of vision’”. His work has clearly changed since those early years but, like another of my 'neglected painters', Algernon Newton, this, in many respect is what David has gone on to do, his haunting and wonderfully strange paintings, making the city feel quite strange and new again.
Nicholas Usherwood, November 2011 |
avid Piddock's latest work is dominated by a series of panoramic urban landscapes that make innovative use of perspective, employing rotating viewpoints some of which turn the full 360 degrees. The paintings make combined use of drawing, photography and software to create images that blend past and present, fact and fiction. The subject of these works, as well as those that employ a more traditional perspective, is a series of London haunts visited and revisited by the artist to gather material out of which he creates an enigmatic world with an unsettling atmosphere.
