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Exhibition by David Reeve
Hastings Fishermen's Beach oil on canvas Private view 20th October 2007 The artist writes The Old Town, on the edge of the trauma that is the town centre, still has an attractive underbelly connected to the romance of its smuggling history, together with a whiff of witchcraft and ancient practises thrown in. Always sophisticated in its tolerance of eccentrics, outsiders and those choosing individual life styles (always expected of people living here), Hastings continues to be a refuge for many people. Always on the verge of social and economic change, Hastings still manages to absorb new comers "in order to stay the same". In the past Turner and Rossetti painted here, even Whistler's mother lived here. Today, there are many artists still working and settling in Hastings and I am pleased to be part of this tradition. I was brought up in South Africa but was born and spent most of my adult life in London. I later attended art college in Brighton where I did graphic design. After leaving college, my main job was with English Heritage helping to save important historic townscapes and buildings. This fed my love for seeking traces of time in the urban landscape and seeing beauty in gradual decay. My paintings in this exhibition of buildings and boats, are a subjective archive of a place painted over the last two years. I see both the buildings and the boats, as part of the same urban landscape; the boats being so close to the shore, (indeed it is still the largest shore based fishing fleet left in England) and are fairly industrial in their working. The townscape in my paintings is the world seen through the windows of my studio. The paintings of boats is the view further away, but brought home and edited into formal shapes and simplified forms. They are glimpses of containment and fragile continuity, composed through panes of glass and seen almost as though on a television screen. The flat lit views, give an overall simplicity and the use of limited perspective helps to create a feeling of memory, it is a reminder or a souvenir of a place you have been. All these paintings have concerns about what home means, or at least finding a place where you can try to belong in a destabilised world. It is about constancy and observation of a subject over time expressed in two dimensions through drawing in paint. My paintings of buildings and boats are in solid blocks of colour, sometimes heavily painted with strong structural concerns using shadow and line to express a certain rigidness and order. The buildings and boats express constancy and containment of time. They are also about surface, texture, peeling, damp, rust, decay and the cycle of change through time and therefore, age with renewal through spiritual regeneration.
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