David Prentice 1936 - 2014

DAVID PRENTICE 1936 - 2014 A LAST LOOK AT THE MALVERNS . .johndaviesgallery joPeriod,hn Modern & Contemporarydavie Art sgallery Period, Modern & Contemporary Art Moreton-in-Marsh Blue Light - Malvern Pastel, 26 x 30 in Front cover: Apogee (detail, see page 11) Oil on canvas, 35 x 35 in DAVID PRENTICE 1936 - 2014 A Last Look at the Malverns 21st June - 19th July 2014 Open 9.30am - 5.00pm Monday to Saturday The Old Dairy Plant . Fosseway Business Park . Stratford Road Moreton-in-Marsh . Gloucestershire . GL56 9NQ t: +44 (0)1608 652255 e: [email protected] www.johndaviesgallery.com English Air - Ridgeway Pastel, 23 x 25 in 2 AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN DAVIES The preparations for this exhibition were well underway when David Prentice died on Wednesday, May 7th 2014. Many who follow the gallery and David’s career quite closely will have been aware that David had suffered various health threats over recent years; nevertheless it is always a shock when such an established personality, particularly someone who has lit up our lives to such a degree, is suddenly gone. In today’s world of expected longevity it is so easy to think that we all can go on forever; all of us would have loved to have seen him live longer, but his level of achievement for his allotted span was significant. I feel that he was a very fulfilled 77 years of age. I considered that David had expended a significant amount of energy producing the very strong body of work that constitutes this exhibition, yet he made light of it. By any measure, a group of over fifty paintings comprising works on paper and small canvases and large canvases in three distinctly contrasting techniques, is no lightweight undertaking. But David was complaining of feeling very tired, and that it was all he could do to get up, have breakfast, attend to e-mails and go back to bed. However, in addition to producing the magnificent paintings that make up this collection, David, at the invitation of Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery, had earlier this year invested a good deal of time curating an exhibition of works by Paul Nash (1889 - 1946) featuring Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Malvern Hills subjects in counterpoint to historic examples of his own works. This exhibition, ‘Skylight Landscape’, opened in May and runs through to July 5th at Worcester Art Gallery. I remember well one of my last visits to David. I had gone over to view his latest paintings. As usual Dinah produced a delightful light lunch and in the afternoon David invited me to chat while he rested on his bed. Dinah was busy in her studio. David and I chatted for the rest of the afternoon in a very reminiscent way, so much so that Dinah went out for an Indian takeaway to sustain us. Whilst I was conscious that there was something special, intimate, about that afternoon and evening, I didn’t pick up any signals of imminent mortality. At the end of April, by which time David and I had decided on the staging of the show that is the subject of this catalogue, I was out cycling on Bank Holiday Monday. Having tackled some severe hills en-route to a friend’s house and experiencing some subsequent discomfort, I found myself being taken to Warwick A&E. I was kept in for observation, then transferred to University Hospital, Walsgrave, Coventry. I underwent surgery there ten days later, and learned on that Saturday that David had died the day that I was in theatre. I had done the layout for the catalogue in hospital whilst waiting for my operation, and now I find myself introducing this exhibition from an unexpected and contrasting perspective to the conversation that I had hoped to have had with David at this stage. Happily, David, knowing that I had already been admitted to hospital, took it upon himself to write about the paintings and these musings are reproduced on pages 21 - 23. Continued on page 4 3 I first met David and Dinah Prentice in late 1995 at a dinner party given by Carol Holt, a very good friend of one of my sisters. I remember the evening pretty clearly; Carol and her husband Jim lived at Barnards Green, near Malvern. It was a most enjoyable evening, excellent food and wine and I found everyone most engaging. On the wall was one of David’s outstanding watercolour views of the Malvern Hills, an example featuring a couple walking along the ridgeway against the evening light. It wasn’t long before I followed through with a visit to the Prentice’s home in Malvern. I knew that I was to be meeting an exceptionally good watercolourist, but I had no idea of the range and scope of the rest of his picture making. It was a memorable visit, and the scene has remained almost unchanged since that time. As you enter the house, a reasonably substantial Victorian villa, the first two rooms off the hallway - once living rooms - were completely taken over as Dinah’s studios: the first an ideas room full of books and tables for cutting out materials for her large scale appliqué work; the second, the larger of the two rooms, for assembling her large scale wall hangings. The same arrangement is mirrored on the first floor by David’s two studios. The first on the left, the smaller of the two, is immaculately organised as a small English Air - Contour reference library and a room for the creation of all the paper-related works. Thus, in Pastel, 23 x 25 in this studio, fully worked-up watercolours have been created from the sketch-books, reed-pen and wash compositions not done en-plein air have come into existence, as have both types of his pastel works: the more representationally accurate examples similar to the watercolours and then the big, contrasting, expansive, semi-abstract ‘colourist’ works mostly 33 inches square. The shelves in this room were neatly laden with watercolour supplies and sticks of pastel all filling the room with their associated aromas. Then, in the larger room next door, David would work up his oils. Having ordered up the materials for his stretchers and canvases, after the necessary preparation, he would simply place a number of canvases on the plain white walls, each on a pair of nails. They would usually range in size from as small as 8 x 9 inches right up to as much as 59 inches square. He would start his oils by laying in a profile or sky-line of a section of the hills, working in large but thin areas of colour and building up from there. He considered most of his oils in primarily abstract terms, although the far less graphic City of London paintings (2000 - 2008) and the highly naturalistic Green Fuse paintings (2010) would be exceptions to this approach. Continued on page 6 English Air - Dark Passage Pastel, 23 x 25 in 4 Yellow Beacon Oil on canvas, 35 x 35 in 5 From the first sell out exhibition that we staged for David in 1996, we have subsequently had the privilege of showing his paintings regularly every eighteen months to two years. In this period we have learned of his influences and the painters that he admired most. David has always admired the painter Paul Nash (1889 - 1946) and he has more than one Nash drawing amongst his very meaningful collection of other artists’ works. Likewise, a Ben Nicolson drawing of roof-tops in St. Ives, and an ink drawing of a tree-root by Graham Sutherland. A small David Cox drawing is also included, together with various works by contemporary friends for which he has great affection. The names of the artists cited above speak quietly of the ‘proper’, ‘elevated’ plane on which David’s thoughts were always circulating. Then come the surprises, Rubens and Rupert Bear. David identified with Rubens in settling and committing himself to a chosen location, digging deep and repeatedly treating the same subject, finding new aspects, new angles. For Rubens it was Het Steen and the surrounding landscape. For David, it became the Malvern Hills. He found them inexhaustible. He would say that he saw no merit in the idea of touring the country like a travelling artist doing ‘postcard views’. The Rupert Bear influence is much more obvious when one thinks about it. Actually, as a boy, David did love English Air - Misty Morning the Rupert Bear journals and annuals; he loved the stories but he was also attracted Pastel, 23 x 25 in to the illustrations and what is very notable in the pictures that go with the stories is the depth of picture plane portraying the scene, most particularly the sense of elevation. Few of us will have trouble conjuring up an image of Rupert Bear up a tree or standing on some promontory, arm outstretched pointing at something in the far distance. A sense of drama and a sense of place are the immediate sensations communicated. This is what David did pictorially with the Malvern Hills. He came to possess them visually through his inexhaustible explorations. Having built kites with attached cameras he even ‘flew’ above them. A very high proportion of his Malvern Hills paintings are drawn from an elevated perspective. But the magic doesn’t stop there. He was also an inveterate observer of the play of light and the weather. The hill chain has something of its own micro-climate, and this, coupled with David’s great depth and resource in handling the materials themselves - reed-pen (he made his own), watercolour, pastel, oil pastel, oil, a vast range of brushes and latterly oil-stick - make the effects he achieved hugely inspiring.

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