Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery

David Whitaker studied at Blackpool Technical College and School of Art before going on the Royal Academy Schools in the early 1960's and winning the Young Contemporaries Prize for Painting in 1965. He has enjoyed a distinguished lecturing and examining career - including Wimbledon School of Art, the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and Chelsea School of Art. He has spoken at conferences at Central St. Martin's and the Tate Gallery in addition to having an impressive record of solo and group exhibitions.

‘I am not swayed by fashion and believe my development has rarely stumbled off course in fifty years of practice. In all this time I have strived to avoid repetition, constipation, and a formulaic method of painting. I find my work progresses in cycles with ideas and subjects appearing and reappearing months, years and even decades in time. With each renewal of interest, the ideas are enriched by my advanced experience and my changing physical capabilities. I would like to redo old work, believing I could improve it, but there is no time, new ways of expressing myself force me into the unknown, where instinct and courage are all I can depend on.'

The impetus for Recycle comes from a desire to use the wooden off cuts that have littered Whitaker's studio floor and the mountains of failed watercolours that surround them. It can be referred to as a period of cut and glue metamorphosis, fuelled by a renewed interest in the three-dimensional form and the ideas of subliminal experience, as best expressed by Leonardo's deluge drawings, Turner's storms at sea and Rothko's veils of misty colour.