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DAVID GREENALL Graduated 1986 – Winchester School of Art “His are exemplary semi-abstract works, paraphrases of Harbour and headland and the landscape of Lewis, where the painter lives. Without knowing a great deal about this artist, other than that he used to be a fisherman, the remarkable simplicity which informs these works attests that the move from the South of England to Lewis in 1990 has been part of an on-going spiritual pilgrimage, aimed at cutting out the distractions and dross of modern urban life. This is land and seascape as devotional icon. Subtly striped and richly coloured platonic shapes rise up against the dark blue sea, their surfaces only faintly scarred by signs of passage. And the wax tempera used by the artist makes these markings seem ghost-like, ethereal, even child-like.” Richard Jaques, The Scotsman, July 21, 1993. “Greenall is a maker of marks – strangely primal scratchings into his wax medium, as if they were runic messages on ancient stones. He works in bold tranches of colour, splitting space into unlikely compartments, each secure and self-sufficient, but relying on each other for total balance and harmony. It is not too fanciful, I think, to suggest that in his learning time at Winchester, Greenall came under the spell of William Crozier. His work is not derivative of the Glaswegian wizard’s incantations of colour and form, but he has learned from him about mass and tone, how to turn the planes and contours of the land into a new and mysterious geometry. |
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