DAVID MANNING

PROFILE

David Manning was born in Zimbabwe in 1968, but grew up in Norfolk in a farming family. He studied at The Norwich School of Art and Design and The Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design, and graduated with Hons in Fine Art Painting in 1990.  

In 1991 he moved to France and worked in the Bordeaux Region renovating and converting stone properties. In 1994 moved to Paris and combined apartment alterations and Normandy farm house renovation with work as a children’s Gallery / Museum guide, and arts activities co-ordinator for the American University / Embassy in Paris while showing paintings with the “Art en Seine” group in the Latin Quarter.  

In 1996 he returned to the south west of France where he worked as a self employed landscape gardener and practising artist based between St. Emilion and Bergerac. From 2005 he began to divide his time between the UK and France .  

Works are held privately in Argentina , Australia , Cyprus , France , Holland , Spain , UK and USA .  

APPROACH TO WORKS  

Having spent most of my life to date in the countryside, the landscape quite naturally has underpinned everything on a daily basis for me. I’m uncertain that I have anything exact to communicate by my own visions of it beyond perhaps that it serves as a diary allowing me to unravel my thoughts while the pictures take shape. They begin with no definite ambition and often meander away from the ideas that first sparked the initial touches of paint.  

Generally the works are based on recall alone and frequently after a lapse of time.  Places reappear long after I’d forgotten them. The works although separate share a common theme which refers almost always to having some connection to water – from shingle in the surf to the stillness of a river’s back water.  

The pieces, of mixed media, mainly on paper, foam board or wood are a combination of fluid pools, planes and veils of colour created by alternating washes and glazes; removed by degrees and then overlaid again and so on.  The overall ambiguity of the surface is punctuated by placing more graphic hints of identifiable elements in the landscape as motifs within the picture to counteract an entirely abstract rendition.  

This blend evokes a place familiar to myself and in-spite of the absence of any true topographical “fingerprints” I hope also suggests the essence of a landscape unique to the viewer’s own perceptions. By returning to the paintings gradually their apparent simplicity reveals a more complex weaving of textures and depth.  

David Manning
2006

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