Growing up in the USA and now based in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, what Harold David recognises as his first experience with art is one that others might overlook. “My mother was an artist with her two hour daily make-up routine,” he recalls. “I would sit and watch every day in complete awe.”
With 25 years of artmaking behind him, the sense of wonder David has long found in the experience of life and translated into original, imaginative works is not something he ever had to force. His refusal to “colour inside the lines” as a boy was perhaps an early indicator of an interest in abstraction that would later resurface. After painting from a young age though, it was photography that first captured his interest.
Establishing himself as one of Australia’s premier portrait photographers, David’s photographic work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Australian Centre for Photography, Penrith Regional Gallery and Blacktown Arts Centre, all in Sydney, as well as the Fujieda City Museum in Japan. His iconic portrait of Bob Hawke drinking a strawberry milkshake won the People’s Choice Award at the prestigious National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2018.
Having achieved so highly in his photographic practice, the artist then shifted focus to painting in his 50s – a pivot that might have appeared radical from the outside but represented a natural returning to roots for David. Now, he paints every day.
“After I get my kids to school and on weekends, I hit the studio,” he says. “Some days, I sit for hours contemplating, some days 10 minutes. I am in complete bliss, even when I’m feeling a bit abject. All feelings are valid as they are energy; I work through the range as I paint.”
Describing himself as an abstract expressionist/surrealist, David gives himself over to pure automatism, allowing his sense of inspiration from daily life, emotions, music, and nature to manifest spontaneously in his work. “I put paint on my brush, have faith and paint. I go by intuition.”
Fields of colour painted in an energetic flurry play off against negative space, dark lines snake across the surface, figures are occasionally discernible but more often remain an inscrutable element of his extensive language of mark and gesture. Canvases seem to expand outwards in the eye of the beholder as we succumb to the sense of free fall and boundlessness that David so skilfully creates. The pointed and often humorous titles that the artist gives his works attest to his unique ways of observing the world.
David’s solo show This and the Edge of the World at Fox Galleries, Melbourne in 2021 was a near sell-out, despite Covid-19 lockdowns, and he was a finalist in the 2021 Fishers Ghost Art Award. He is currently working on a new series for a show Adult Contemporary to be held at Fox Galleries, where David is represented.
Featured image:Artist Harold David.Courtesy the artist and Fox Galleries, Melbourne.