David Gentleman
The artist David Gentleman has an exhibtion currently in London. He featured in a Guardian profile published on Saturday 17th April.
Gentleman was influenced by the art of Thomas Bewick in the early part of his career.
"Gentleman's father, a Scotsman, had started out as a painter before heading to Hertford in 1930, the year of David's birth, to work on publicity for corporate clients such as Shell. As a result, international modernism – clean planes, collage and the like – was in the family's visual vocabulary; but so was the singularly insular modernism of Edward Bawden and his circle, splicing those post-Cubist spaces with evocations of quirky, folksy Englishness.
At the outset of his career, Gentleman leaned the latter way, towards nostalgia. The imperishable rural vignettes of Thomas Bewick prompted a highly personal love affair with wood engraving which was nurtured by John Nash when he entered the Royal College of Art in 1950; but, Gentleman recalls, "nobody else was doing it. My fellow students all thought of it as a hangover from the 30s" – the heyday, that is, of another of his artistic heroes, Eric Ravilious."
David Gentleman's paintings are on show at Fine Arts Society, London, until 24 April 2010.
There is also a new edition of George Ewart Evans's Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, which was originally published in 1956 (272pp, Full Circle Editions). For more information click here.
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