David Gould

DAVID GOULD

The swimmers and bathers depicted in these works are having fun, enjoying being in water and with one another. They could be any of us on holiday, indulging our childlike and unselfconscious delight in swimming, splashing and cavorting in the sea.

David Gould has invented ways of combining handcrafted techniques with images recorded in Italy using digital video. These enable him to link together successive momentary images, and to reveal minute sequential fragments of time and activity within a pictorial space. Tiny narratives are thus expanded, and small groups of bathers transformed into virtual crowds.

Low relief is used to animate the typically mechanical and processed character of the digital print with a sense of the three dimensionality and other qualities of colour, texture and surface of bathers and water. The figures in low relief seem to emerge through the picture plane and to enter the space of the viewer, and appear to swim both through moments in time and across the surface of each work.

These quirky, sometimes dreamlike images celebrate the minute, inconsequential, but often surprising moments of everyday life.

Repetition and small variations of movement and gesture appear as though frozen, isolated from the familiar flow of time and space, and enhanced by the incessant motion of the sea.

Discourse on Water Digital Print on Perspex 29 x 28cm

Bounce I Digital Print on Perspex 40 x 28.5cm

Swell Digital Print on Perspex 40.5 x 26cm

The Kiss Digital Print on Board 40.5 x 80cm

Big and Little Swimmers Digital Print on Board 51.5 x 81.5 cm

Reverie Digital Print on Perspex 40.5 x 16cm

Sea of Faces Digital Print on Perspex 56.5 x 80.5cm

Biography David Gould was born in London in 1947 and has lived and worked in Cardiff for over 30 years. He studied painting at the Gloucestershire College of Art in Cheltenham and the Royal College of Art in London, where he graduated with the M. Art (RCA) in1972. He was subsequently awarded the Abbey Major Scholarship to Rome in 1972 -3 and a Junior Lecturer Fellowship at Cardiff College of Art in 1974-5. He went on to teach art full time at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London and the Cardiff School of Art and Design, where he was Director of the Foundation Course in Art and Design, until he retired in 2008.

He now works full time as an artist and has exhibited regularly in group and solo exhibitions in London, Cardiff and elsewhere. His work has been included regularly in the Sunday Times Watercolour Competition and the Discerning Eye Exhibitions in London, where he has twice won prizes for his work. His work is in public and private collections in the UK and overseas.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 1985 Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff 1985 Buxton Museum and Art Gallery 1991 Black Bull Gallery, London 1996 Oriel Gallery, London 1998 Atrium Bookshop, London 2011 Hay Hill Gallery, London SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 1982 Summer Show 1, Serpentine Gallery, London 1994, 1995, 1996, 2009, 2010: Sunday Times Watercolour Competition, London 1995 Blue Gallery, London 1996 Thompson's Gallery, London 2002 The Affordable Arts Fair, London 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010: The Discerning Eye, London (2004 Humphries Purchase Prize Winner) (2005 Wales Regional Prize Winner) 2006 Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden 2010 “Real”, London Kooywood Gallery, Cardiff 2011 Kooywood Gallery, Cardiff Bay Art, Cardiff

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