Window of Colour
by David Armitage
2nd May - 18th May 2013
David Armitage is a successful abstract artist of great originality.
He is a Tasmanian who trained in Melbourne and spent much of his life in New Zealand. He painted and ran the City Art Gallery programme in Auckland before coming to East Sussex to live in 1973. He has, above all, a splendid sense of colour and form and his work clearly shows a nostalgia for the strong light and surroundings of his early life near the southern Pacific Ocean. One senses he is a beachcomber who loves wandering along the edge of the sea picking up dried pieces of wood or examining sea life in the sand pools or underwater. These are his main imagery sources which he manipulates into magical but strange shapes on both his large and quite small canvases.
The striking centrepiece is ‘Saraband’ which is about 2 x 3.2 metres and has its canvas covered with a receding red/mauve surface of thin paint which is interjected with a few black bone and square shapes and a sweeping ‘rainbow’ of blues and blacks, the whole giving a feeling of a Spanish interior.
The progress of his work reads like a spiritual travelogue.
In 2009 David Armitage was invited to participate in the Oxford Union Debate, supporting the motion that 'conceptual art is not art'.
