Professor David L. Carpanini, NEAC

David Carpanini was born in Glamorgan in 1946. He was trained at Gloucestershire College of Art, the Royal College of Art and the University of Reading.

RE 1982 (ARE 1979), RWA 1983 (ARWA 1977), RBA 1976, NEAC 1983, RCA 1992, Hon RWS 1996.

In 1969 he won the British Institution Awards Committee Annual Scholarship for engraving and has since exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, and other major exhibitions in the UK and abroad. His drawings, painting and etchings are almost entirely devoted to the presentation of the industrial scene of South Wales. Lonely figures, bleak hills, ramshackle backyards, perching terraces of houses dominating chapels and ragged roadside sheep are the images to which he is faithful and to which he attributes the development of his creative imagination.

He has exhibited at; Piccadilly Gallery, Pattersons, John Martin, Agnews, New Academy Gallery, Fosse, Albany, Attic, New Arts Centre, Bankside. Solo exhibitions include; Welsh Arts Council, Oriel Cardiff 1980, Business Art Gallery RA 1984, Warwick Arts Festival 1986, Mostyn Gallery 1988, Rhondda Heritage Gallery 1989, 1994, Walsall Museum and Art Gallery 1989, Albany 1991, Attic 1994, 1998, 2002, St David's Hall Cardiff 1999. Taliesin 2000.

His work has been acquired by the following organisations: National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; Newport Museum and Art Gallery; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea; British National Oil Corporation; The Contemporary Art Society for Wales; University of Swansea; The Rhondda Heritage Park; Imperial College of Science and Technology; The Police Training Centre of Wales; The Welsh Mining Museum; British Steel; Rank Xerox; Redpath Mining Corporation, Ontario, Canada; University of Bangor; Coleg Harlech; National Coal Board; Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs; Department of Environment, London; Royal College of Art; Glamorgan, Gloucestershire, Clwyd, Yorkshire and Avon Education Authorities, Greater London Council; Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Ashmolean Museum Oxford; and by private individuals in the USA, Canada, Australia, West Germany, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Britain.

Films: Everyone a special kind of Artist - David Carpanini - producer director Jeff Perks, Riverfront Pictures for Channel 4, 1984.

David Carpanini - Artist of Wales - producer Carol Byrne-Jones, presenter David Meredith, HTV 1987.

A Word in Your Eye - six part series exploring painting and poetry in Wales, HTV 1997.

David Carpanini is President of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and formerly Professor of Art at the University of Wolverhampton.

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The term painter-printmaker is, in my case, absolutely correct. There is no order of importance; each method of pictorial resolution allows me to explore different aspects of my personal vision, which is almost exclusively concerned with that part of South Wales known as the Afan Valley and the place of my birth. The personal whys and wherefores of pictorial invention are always difficult if not impossible to pin down in words. I have stated elsewhere that one should never be puzzled by what to paint or draw. But for each of us there are certain scenes and subjects which more readily provoke the responses that eventually manifest themselves in pictorial form. Wales is a land of enormous contrasts and variety of scenery. There is something in the quality of light and atmosphere that arrests the eye and provokes the imagination.

My inspiration lies in the contemplation of the familiar, I believe that man has a special bond, a special relationship with that part of Earth which nourished his boyhood and it is in the valleys and former mining communities of South Wales, scarred by industrialisation but home for a resolute people that I found the trigger for my creative imagination. I remain grateful for having been born there at a particular time in the history of those valleys and with a modest facility to record my reactions. The stark landscape and close knit, often claustrophobic social infrastructure are a fundamental part of my own background and I have attempted to use the natural drama of this location to explore aspects of the human condition such as fear, isolation, loneliness, brutality, dignity, pride and hope. These are concepts with which we can all identify regardless of personal circumstances or background. My imagery is drawn from my background and experience because it is what I know best. Inevitably there is the danger of nostalgic insularity. That is a problem all image makers working with such material have to wrestle with and often fail to master, but with a measure of critical awareness it is possible to go beyond time and place and touch a universal chord of human understanding.

All my paintings and prints are studio assemblages; unhurried distillations of sketchbook observations and visual, memories. I have always made extensive use of small notebooks. These are working tools in which I make records of both a graphic and literary nature, of figures, clouds, and buildings; of whatever fleeting impression or group of forms captures my attention. These observations are not always put to immediate use, indeed months, even years may elapse before a particular theme is explored further.

It is an accumulative and assimilative procedure that in Graham Sutherland's words makes the artist as "absorbent as blotting paper and watchful as a cat". For me, it is also the kind of remorseless practice that I find essential to representation at the deepest level.

It is from this reservoir of material that my pictures grow. Serial drawings are developed, compositional studies, searching for the right grouping of figures and their correct relationship to an appropriate setting, anticipating that the eventual combination of forms will prove emotionally expressive and decoratively striking. The design and manner of any work arises as a natural process of growth and evolution; as an extension of object and purpose, not imposed in a preconceived way.

Quite naturally, every artist's work varies considerably in approach. Style and method of application develop in accord with personality and temperament. Indeed many psychological and physical factors enter into each person's view of their world. There can be no hard and fast rules, but I do believe that we should try to equip ourselves with a knowledge and understanding of the conventions of our craft in order that we can express our 'view in a coherent and visually articulate manner.

From that perspective I have never understood why the visual arts continue to be plagued by that barbaristic cult which takes delight in blacklisting the whole body of inherited studio practice as an impediment to aesthetic immediacy.

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Attic Gallery, Swansea

The Royal West of England Academy

Bankside Gallery, London

The Royal Cambrian Academy