Threadneedle Prize finalist David Storey is a British figurative painter. His psychologically charged paintings are about memory, with half-remembered people and places emerging from complex layers of texture and colour.

"My paintings are an exploration of memory. They offer ‘glimpsed’ or half-remembered figures and faces – 're-imagined ancestors' recovered from a personal archive of the forgotten.

My ideas come from material that accidentally comes to hand, an old photograph for example might chime or resonate. I then embark on a quest to unlock the essence of the image in a way that is somehow extra-visual. This journey of development and discovery can take anything from 5 days to 5 years until a kind of alchemy takes place and things seem to harmonise of their own accord in a way that can be very rewarding.

I paint in an expressionistic way using rags and sponges because the physical marks and textures are a fundamental element of what I am trying to achieve. The challenge for me though is to retain an economy of execution – an effortless effort."

Fleeting Glimpse
by Simon Beavis
Working from his studio in an old Victorian dairy in Brighton, East Sussex, David draws deeply on the images and atmospheres of his own childhood and teenage years spent growing up in West Cumbria.

Indeed, the landscapes, lights and skies that illuminate many of his paintings are gleaned from a small area within a 30-mile radius of Workington, the town where he grew up. He references elements of this world regularly - maybe the wild fast-changing skies above the Solway Firth, the fells and hillsides looming from a veil of mist or the old sandstone Victorian buildings typical of the area that turn black when it rains. It's here too where he spent cherished summer holidays absorbing the changing lights above the sea and the sandy, hill-encircled shorelines of that coast that feature in many of his paintings.

Yet despite these distinct reference points, these are by no means works of nostalgia. The alluring figures that populate the paintings belong to no particular time and place. Instead he draws his ideas from a range of material that comes accidentally to hand, an old photograph found in a bric-a-brac shop for instance. In this way he rescues memories at the point where they might vanish forever and then recontextualizes them.

Using this found material the process of creation starts as David begins to unlock the characters that will eventually take centre stage in the finished work. From studies on small pieces of board to the full canvas where the process of creation moves much faster, done in deliberately brief and intense bursts of creativity, working as much with his hands, palette knives, rags and sponges as with the brush to manipulate the oil paint. It's a process of teasing out ideas that can take, he admits, anywhere from five days to five years.

This process of realising the final image swiftly and physically lends an intensely expressionistic quality to these figurative paintings. You see it particularly in the, often dramatic, sky or seascapes that frame the figures at the centre of the work. These backdrops draw us into a grander, darker, more turbulent space or, in the brighter more colourful backdrops, to a place of deeper calm.

Yet it is the figures that hold the attention and draw us in, their bodies nearly always strongly drawn, but their faces left deliberately indistinct and sometimes almost blank. This is how David strives to achieve what he calls a "glimpsed" effect.

The effect is subtle and compelling. Even in the sunniest and most colourful pictures – a woman sitting quietly on a sand dune at Allonby or the 'Children on a Hillside' – the optimism is always balanced by a sense of isolation, of loss, of lives only half-remembered, qualities that prevent the pictures from ever being sentimental. 

They have that same ache, and that same hint of darkness, that is more directly found in the edgier paintings where he is experimenting with a more subdued, often monochrome palette such as 'Hymn to the Light'. The paintings speak of the extraordinary things to be found in profoundly everyday events - and it is this that, ultimately, makes the paintings so accessible, yet so intriguing.

In his recent works we see those ideas and his unique way of working coming to fruition. These are the works of an artist who is striving to perfect his technique, forever trying to move closer to the point where he can capture an essence of human life that can so often and so easily slip through the fingers.

EDUCATION

• 1996–96 Slade School of Art, Summer School

• 1973–76 Middlesex University, BA honours degree, art & design

• 1972–73 Hornsey Art College, Foundation Course
  

PROFESSIONAL

• 1995–Present: Artist

• 1986–94 Artist/Designer, The Bureaux

• 1991–92 External Assessor Croydon Art College

• 1987–90 Visiting Lecturer Central St. Martins, London

• 1983–85 Art Director, Chrysalis Records and 2-Tone Records

• 1979–82 Designer, Chrysalis Records and 2-Tone Records

• 1977–79 Designer, Rocket Records
  
  

PRIZES AND AWARDS

• 2019 Discerning Eye Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London

• 2013 Finalist Saatchi Art “Showdown”

• 2012 Finalist ‘Threadneedle Prize’

• 2012 Finalist ‘Sunday Times Watercolour Competition’

PAST EXHIBITIONS

• 2020 Discerning Eye Exhibition, London

• 2020 Group Show Stratford Gallery, Stratford on Avon

• 2020 Festival Show, Cameron Contemporary Art

• 2020 Upstart Gallery, London

• 2019 The Seventh View, C24 Gallery , New York

• 2019 “A Personal Folklore”, Joint Show, Cameron Contemporary Art

• 2019 Discerning Eye Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London

• 2019 Saul Hay Fine Art Manchester

• 2019 FFS, Saatchi Gallery with Castlegate Gallery

• 2019 The London Art Fair with Castlegate Gallery

• 2019 Group Show, Browse Gallery, Berlin

• 2018 Group Show Castlegate House Gallery, Cumbria

• 2018 Somewhere Else, Stratford Gallery, Stratford on Avon

• 2018 Group Show, Saul Hay Fine Art, Manchester

• 2018 The London Art Fair with Castlegate Gallery

• 2017Solo Exhibition Panter and Hall, London

• 2017 Winter Show at Cameron Contemporary Art

• 2017 All Square at Cameron Contemporary Art

• 2017 The Colour of Summer at Cameron Contemporary Art

• 2017 Festival Show at Cameron Contemporary Art

• 2017 Solo Show (22 Feb–19 March), Highgate Contemporary, London

• 2016 Winter Show at Cameron Contemporary Art

• 2016 Group Xmas Show, Highgate Contemporary

• 2016 Affordable Art Fair London

• 2016 Feature: Inside the Studio, Saatchi Art homepage

• 2016 Figure, A Cast of Characters at Cameron Contemporary Art

• 2016 Festival exhibition at Cameron Contemporary, Brighton

• 2016 'Art Without Boundaries' exhibition, Leyden Gallery, London

• 2016 Invited to judge the Travers Smith Art Prize

• 2016 AAF, New York

• 2016 Chosen by Saatchi Art as their 'Artist of the Day'

• 2015 AAF, London

• 2015 Solo Show, Panter and Hall, London

• 2015 Saatchi Art Exhibition, 'Curated by Rebecca Wilson'

• 2014 AAF, Hamburg

• 2014 Art Southampton, New York

• 2014 Solo show, Thomas and Paul Contemporary, London

• 2014 AAF, London

• 2013 AAF, Hamburg

• 2013 'Prelude' at Thomas and Paul Contemporary, London

• 2013 AAF, London

• 2013 Finalist, Saatchi Art 'Showdown'

• 2012 Finalist, Threadneedle Prize, Mall Galleries, London

• 2012 Finalist, The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition

• 2012 Saatchi Art exhibition '100 CURATORS 100 DAYS'

• 2011 Cultivate, Vyner Street Gallery

• 2011 Fern Felix, Glasgow

• 2011 ArtBeat Festival, Woburn

• 2010 The Coningsby Gallery, London

• 2008 Lautieri Moores Open, The Gallery in Cork Street

• 2005 Encounters, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery

• 2003 Sussex Open, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery

• 1999 Icons of Pop, National Portrait Gallery, London

• 1986 Festival of British Art & Design, Vienna
  

MEDIA

• 2016 Feature: Inside the Studio, Saatchi Art homepage

• 2014 Article by Richard Unwin, The Art Collective

• 2014 David Storey in conversation with Mike Southon in front of an invited audience at the Thomas and Paul Gallery, London.

• 2013 Interview, The Art Collective

• 2011 BBC2 arts programme 'Show Me the Monet'

• 2010 Sunday Times Magazine article
  

COLLECTIONS

• Private collections worldwide