David Parfitt NEAC finds pleasure and ideas in the look of things he has come to know well - the river and its tree-lined banks, the bridges, pubs and tower blocks, and the passers-by along the towpath and the foreshore.
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Artist Statement
David’s early paintings were of family and friends and of the gaunt mountains and industrial valleys of South Wales. The effects of changing light and seasons, and the meetings and contrasts between the man-made and the natural, were then as now constant themes in his work. Today he lives beside the tidal Thames in West London. Here he finds pleasure and ideas in the look of things he has come to know well - the river and its tree-lined banks, the bridges, pubs and tower blocks, and the passers-by along the towpath and the foreshore.
Method of working
At Newport Art School the first thing students were expected to do was to make a sketchbook, take it into town and draw in it. Later they were asked to use these drawings as subject matter in the studio - painting directly from the drawings tested their validity. David Parfitt still works in much the same way today. Now he makes small paintings and drawings out of doors to pin down the essential colour qualities of a moment and to search out motifs for larger compositions. He works out of doors also on these larger canvases, as well as in the studio, and he often uses paper cut outs to resolve colour harmonies and compositional elements. His ambition is to evoke and fix with paint that first transitory visual sensation.