David Spiller - I Always Loved You

Year: 2016
Medium: Acrylic and pencil on stitched canvas panels
Hand signed on verso
Size: 34 x 35.5 in (86 x 90 cm)
Framed size: 35 x 37 in (88.9 x 93.9 cm)
Provenance: From the artist's Estate

According to the Artist

“When I first went to art college I studied Typography at Sidcup Art college. I’m interested in the way text has shaped our world. Those beautiful blue advertisements on the sides of old French barns as you drove along. I’d never seen anything like it. The sign-writers couldn’t always get the whole message into the space, so they’d wrap it round a corner or run a word vertically. They stood out like beacons in the landscape, and I guess that’s what I’d like my paintings to do.”

David lived in Berlin in the 80s and always recollected stories about the potency and imagery he saw on the Berlin wall. Regularly referring to his paintings as a “wall”, and loving the notion of building a wall and defacing it by scribbling on it… like a child with building blocks that had been carefully placed, the primal urge and satisfaction in knocking it down. He often cited the Picasso, saying, “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge”.

“I think it is desperation a lot of the time in my work… What the hell do you do? You work like a child with a tower of bricks, building this thing, and there comes a point when you want to push it over. I make the wall and then scribble on it... At this point in my life I feel I’m trying to get the important message down… Cut to the chase… It’s about four alphabet letters… LOVE… That mean so much… expressed… In songs… In poems… In art… It’s like I’m leaving a note, a prayer, a poem in the Western Wall in Jerusalem…”

David laboriously assembled swatches of canvas, almost “neurosurgically” sewing painted panels together, beautifully constructed, precise, hard-edge color abstract works that were painstakingly stenciled with lyrics from a favorite song. This unique way of assembling a painting (not obvious at first sight) gave him the freedom to remove or add panels, to obtain the “right” balance. He loved the precision and possibilities this process offered, explaining that a line could not be painted so sharply; he took pride in their labor of love assembly, a magical process of what appears at first glance to be a seemingly effortless job.

 “The idea just hangs in my mind that if you make it by hand you will discover what it is. I can hear it echoing from people in my past that I have respected.”

David used a lot of triangles in his practice. Pythagoras was one of his heroes, and he always felt mathematics and scientists could “work out the world”. In 2014, David visited the Baptistery in Florence; when he entered the darkened chamber from the bright sunshine outside, he was initially extremely under-whelmed, until his eyes became accustomed to the low light and the magic of the venue came into focus. The simple marble panels with black and white abstract patterns were illuminated and thereafter referenced regularly in his paintings.