David Scott Moore

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Elements: earth fire

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Painting outside ‘en plein air’ affords the kind of spatial freedom that means even a small painting can give a large sense of space.

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The locations for David's work have included the South Downs hillsides and panoramas, Sussex woodland and waterways, the Hampshire New Forest, Tuscan mountains, Alps in the South of France and riversides in Avignon and Arles.  He is presently painting in protected Arun Valley wetlands and is planning a project in Scotland.

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An en plein air landscape is a live interpretation and often an intuitive approach to understanding a location. It lends well to the first-person narrative. The feelings and thoughts that arise during the process of creating a landscape outside are subtly recorded within the painting in ways that reach beyond initial intentions of design or thought. One of David's main rationales is capturing the transience of life and our connection with nature.

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Revisiting locations to paint allows for the accumulation of further abstractions and rhythms, which are layered successively upon the surface over a number of days, recording changes in real time.

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His mind is always working but the gut and the heart play a strong role. In the studio, the process becomes both experiential and reflective as methods are more thought-oriented.  Further stages of destruction and creation occur, leading to new surface, visual devices, motifs and colour harmony.  This can be an evolving process, partially formed from memory of the live locations and partially from the use of subsequent studio discoveries.  When David develops paintings in this way, many elements of the original on-site marks are partially buried but still remain visible enough so that they can be visually excavated.

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The brush marks, layered textures and painting rhythms aim to capture moments in time and duration and draw attention to surface.  Some parts of the multi-layered compositions remain unpainted and abstract.  If the viewer’s eye is drawn in and out, and back again, from up close to the painting’s surface and back out to see the whole painting then David hopes to better invite an observation of the spatial interplay between the imagery, the surface and back to the whole of a the painting.

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