Masterworks

David is a strong believer in drawing inspiration from his local environment. After relocating from the dusty outback of New South Wales to tropical Queensland, He quickly discovered that painting beach scenes and seascapes was among his most enjoyable and relaxing forms of expression. Living and working alongside some of Australia’s most famous beaches, has become a driving force behind his observations of Australian beaches and his passion to illustrate them.

Portrayed in a very impressionistic style, David’s busy beachscapes begin with a simple hand sketch onto canvas. After laying down his initial colour composition with brush and paint, he sets the work aside to dry for a day or two before overlaying the image with oils applied with a pallet knife.

Carefully allowing areas of the original under work to show through with each application of paint,  David seeks to draw the viewer’s attention to an expansive depth of paint within each scene; random knife strokes, scratches, scrapes, and seemingly insignificant blobs of paint, gradually become the details that bring these colourful beach illustrations to life.

The serene and tranquil water scenes within this style are almost a complete flipside to his dusty landscapes, however these two styles and subjects are very much connected to David’s heritage, and his life growing up in the outback. Many of these images are recreations of memories from David’s time spent fishing the waters of the Darling river, and the many lakes and tributaries that flowed from it around Menindee, a small outback town located roughly 1.5 hours drive east of Broken Hill NSW where David grew up. As a boy, and well into his early 20’s, one of David’s favourite escapes was camping and fishing with family and friends around the river and lakes at Menindee. Even as a very young child, he remembers driving to Menindee with his father, who interestingly, lived in the area for most of his childhood. David says, ‘there was nothing more relaxing than watching the sun go down on the water, and observing the reflections as the bird life settled into the trees for the night; those images and memories will be forever etched into my mind’.