David Prentice 1936 – 2014

DAVID PRENTICE 1936 – 2014 A Window on a Life’s Work - a Selling Retrospective Summer 2017 Period, Modern & Contemporary Art DAVID PRENTICE 1936 – 2014 A Window on a Life’s Work - a Selling Retrospective Back garden, Acock’s Green, Birmingham (c.1956) Oil, 28 x 36 ins PART I Includes paintings from 1954 and a concentration of Malverns based works from 1992, many not shown at the John Davies Gallery before. June 24th through to August 26th 2017 Monday - Saturday 10am - 5pm PART II Part II (Autumn 2017) will comprise paintings of all periods but will also feature City of London work, paintings inspired by the Scilly Isles, the Isle of Skye and The House that Jack Built. Front cover illustration: All about the Idle Hill (1992) Oil on canvas, 58 x 65 ins The Old Dairy Plant · Fosseway Business Park · Stratford Road Moreton-in-Marsh · Gloucestershire · GL56 9NQ Tel: 01608 652255 · email: [email protected] www.johndaviesgallery.com A PREFACE TO THE EXHIBITION by Dinah Prentice, the late artist’s wife As I write this I am conscious of the warmth and affection enthusiasms – cycling, playing the jazz banjo, walking and that people felt towards David for his mixture of thorough collecting ground samples. After his death, suddenly professionalism, caustic wit and mischief. I remember a everything that had felt familiar acquired a different visitor to his exhibition featuring the Isle of Skye paintings meaning, not least the built-in cupboard in his painting asking if David knew the Skye Boat Song; to the visitor’s studio. Apparently full of ‘stuff’, it was actually memorabilia surprise David took out a mouth-organ from his trouser from the 50’s onwards. There were shelves of different pocket and began to play the haunting tune. Virtually all coloured grounds and earth that he had collected on our the other visitors to the private view started to gather travels. There is a photograph of David striding across a field round, drawn back from the further recesses of the gallery in Spain to collect a sample. I would stop the car for him so to stand listening. he could grab anything in the vehicle that would hold dust later to be transferred to a jam jar and labelled - Glen Brittle George & Sheila (1955) And again, when asked to say something after he received 1 3 beach for example, or Zaragossa camping clay-slip after a Oil, 32 ⁄2 x 39 ⁄4 ins the first prize at the Singer and Friedlander Sunday Times storm or Porthmeor beach sand and so on. Watercolour Competition, David took the opportunity to challenge the assembled acountants and bankers to do their David had strong connections with the University of best to maintain the visibility for this renewal of the great Birmingham. There is a series of paintings on mirrors These images show that David Prentice was already a gifted, mature painter at the English watercolour tradition – “marvellous” a journalist commissioned for the Department of Material and age of 19. These paintings display masterful drawing and sensitively interpreted half- remarked out loud. Many admirers of David’s work will know Metallurgy and Angus Keane, who funded what became the light and atmosphere. George was David’s father and Sheila his younger sister. that he too took this responsibility on himself; here is a Ikon Gallery, was chief accountant at the University when he paragraph from an essay he wrote for the magazine The bought ‘Kate and the Waterlilies’; a subsequent conversation Artist about large watercolours: between us led to what became the gallery now in Brindley Place off Broad Street. “ I first saw the watercolours of 1799 shown together as a group at the exhibition ‘Turner in Wales’ at the Mostyn Art We are showing in this retrospective some early iconic Gallery, Llandudno. A number of the works in the exhibition paintings from his estate accompanied with some great had been folded down the middle to facilitate transport on Malvern paintings from the last thirty years. We, his a pony. My own interest in making watercolours on such a daughters and I, have kept some paintings that have private large scale began with that exhibition.” meanings for us; there was a five-footer in the hall that I would press, like touching him. The canvas was so well I would like to assure his followers that the intervening years stretched that it had an almost human bounce. As indeed since his death have been full of work to preserve his archive do all his paintings. as well as to maintain for his audience a contrasting David – one who had already lived a productive, creative life from student days in Birmingham in the 1950’s. Presented with his carefully filed history in images, letters, articles and newspaper photographs from the 1950’s onwards, I started to put together a wall sized ‘timeline’ collage. Advised to ‘download’ my memories, I have included details of his many April 2017 Birmingham Street (1954/5) Oil, 20 x 14 ins 2 3 DAVID PRENTICE OBITUARY – ANDREW DEMPSEY © The Guardian, 2 June 2014 Artist and founder of an influential gallery who moved from Prentice had early success as an artist. His paintings were abstraction to city views and landscape painting. bought by the Arts Council and shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London; and in the US, he showed with the Betty The painter David Prentice, who has died aged 77, had an Parsons Gallery in New York and was bought by the unusual trajectory as an artist. In the 1960s, when he was Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. This was all one of the founders of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, his good for the CV, but sales were few and far between. work was hard-edged, abstract, close to the Op art of a period when young artists and architects were full of ideas Now with four daughters to support, David and Dinah both for new beginnings. taught, and David eventually became course director for the BA fine art degree at Birmingham Polytechnic (now David's art was about new forms, his hero Piet Mondrian. Birmingham City University). The painting department there was especially strong in those years under the direction of In the late 1980s, when he returned to full-time painting William Gear. Full-time teaching at that time took up three after a career teaching others, it was to the tradition of and a half days a week, and David never stopped the English landscape painting. For many years thereafter, his practice of painting, submitting work for exhibition when subject was the Malvern Hills, which he knew intimately the opportunity arose. He also found time to play jazz (his from countless walks with sketchpad in hand. The forms of favourite instrument was the banjo) in a number of the hills were a constant, the weather constantly changing. Northamptonshire bands. Cycling was a veritable passion; He painted with the concern for structure and surface that he had competed as a youngster and loved to talk about had characterised his earlier work. The watercolours, often road racing, in Britain and main-land Europe. done on the spot, were more specific but the paintings done in the studio were as carefully constructed as ever. David left teaching as soon as circumstances permitted and worked full-time as an artist, beginning with a year as artist- It was not long before he was winning prizes (the Sunday in-residence at Nottingham University in 1986. He and Dinah Times watercolour competition in 1990, for example) and travelled; in her words, they "went to look at mountains" – having exhibitions (more than 20 solo shows since the early the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Highlands, the Welsh mountains. 1990s, many with the John Davies Gallery in Moreton-in- In 1990 they moved from Northamptonshire to live under Marsh, Gloucestershire). In time his subjects expanded to the Malvern Hills. include dramatic cityscapes of London, especially of the river, and the landscape of Skye, or rather its approaches – the David had known this landscape as a boy from family "Road to the Isles" – as well as the Lake District and the excursions but it now became part of his life. He painted it Welsh mountains. in watercolours and oils, and he wrote and spoke about it with knowledge and with love. It is a landscape with many Son of George, a builder and clerk of works at Elmdon artistic associations, famously in the poetry of AE Housman airport, and Ruth (nee Hope), Prentice was born in Solihull, and the music of Edward Elgar. David Prentice: A Malvern West Midlands, and went to Moseley Road art school, Sketch-book (2000) is one of the most attractive tributes to Birmingham, from the age of 13. At Birmingham College of the area. Arts and Crafts, he met Dinah Prentice. They married in 1958 when David was doing his national service and Dinah was A current exhibition at Worcester City Art Gallery and at the Royal Academy Schools in London. Museum, titled Skylight Landscape, combines David's work with that of Paul Nash, one of his heroes. David collected Despairing of the lack of exhibition space in Birmingham, he Nash in a small way and one can see why he admired this and Dinah, with the artists Sylvani Merilion, Robert Groves great English painter who was also a great modernist. His and Jesse Bruton, and with the support of a selfless aspirations were the same. benefactor, Angus Skene, in 1964 founded the Ikon Gallery, which at first occupied a modest kiosk in the Bull Ring He is survived by Dinah and by their daughters, Kate, Rachel, shopping area.

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