Photo: 54 - oil on canvass, 2003 92 x 122 cm by David Gledhill © the artist.
All the Things We Saw is an exhibition of paintings by David Gledhill on show at Kirkby’s Huyton Gallery until March 14.
They are landscape paintings but not in the traditional sense.
"This exhibition features paintings of my home town in the Midlands," he says. "These are the houses, shops and small factories near to where I lived during the first twenty years of my life and which featured along the route of walks I would take with my mother on visits home."
There is nothing particularly special about the place that Gledhill grew up. A housing estate of bungalows, streets with ordinary shops and factories - it could be almost any small town in Britain.
"Whilst the buildings are in no way extraordinary, the associations we attach to the setting of our childhood years make them significant for me and perhaps typical of many people’s experience," he says.
Photo: 46 - oil on canvass, 2003 170 x 240 cm by David Gledhill © the artist.
Gledhill describes his paintings as a blend of conventions and techniques from the history of painting and photography. His aim with these recent works was to find a way to convey the strange contradictions between memory and the living reality of a place.
The subject matter may lack the grandeur of the great outdoors and the wild rugged beauty of nature explored by the Impressionists two centuries ago. But Gledhill’s paintings are true to 21st century experience and reflect the environment that many of us call home.
"With my current work I am interested in exploring apparently mundane or overlooked elements of our visual field in an attempt to reinvest day to day experience with aesthetic content," he says.
David Gledhill, a fine art graduate, lives and works in Manchester. His recent exhibitions include Cedar Avenue at Manchester’s Comme Ca Gallery, Thermo 03 at The Lowry and Look To This Day at Castlefield Gallery. He currently teaches at the University of Central Lancashire and contributes regularly to City Life Magazine and to various artists’ projects.
