Studio Visit with Art Wednesday
October 2012
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In the fourth instalment of our Studio Visit series, we hopped on a train to Hackney Wick to meet painter David Wightman. David was born in Stockport, Greater Manchester in 1980 and moved to London when he was 18 with little to no knowledge about contemporary art or London – he simply wanted to paint and live as a painter. And London seemed to him to be the best place to do it. He was accepted onto the Painting MA at the Royal College of Art when he was just 21 and was the youngest person in the entire college, not bad going for a guy who didn’t know anything about the art world just 3 years previously. Since graduating in 2003 his work has changed dramatically and has swung from abstraction to landscape in recent years – it was his colourful landscapes crafted from layers of wallpaper that caught our eye. Wallpaper has always been a long-term love of his – he grew up in a working-class home filled with textured wallpaper. He first started using it in his work soon after moving to London as an homage to his background.


 
Studio portrait by Hayley Benoit

Every one of his paintings begin with a ‘preparatory drawing (cartoon)’, which is based on several edited found images of mountainscapes, he then transfers the preparatory drawing (cartoon) onto canvas before collaging. Each painting is created using hand-cut pieces of collaged wallpaper in a technique similar to marquetry. Pieces of wallpaper do not overlap and are applied individually until the entire painting is fully collaged. He uses surgical scalpels (the same scalpels that are used in operating theatres) to cut the sections of wallpaper. He sources his wallpaper from a variety of places: cheap modern designs and vintage papers are used alongside generic patterns to suggest the terrain of the landscape. David likes the combination of patterns and textures that point toward domestic interiors and mountainous landscapes. In terms of his studio, he spends a huge amount of time there, painting, reading, and thinking. He tends to work better in the evening and often works until midnight on many days. Because of the laborious nature of his work, he needs to put in long hours. And the time and effort that goes into each painting has forced him into keeping his studio as organised as possible – he’s become obsessed with mixing and cataloguing different colour combinations and therefore has to make sure to label all of his painting pots accurately – colour has become the most important aspect in his work. He’s had a studio in Hackney Wick, East London since 2004 and has seen the area change from nothing more than a forgotten industrial estate, to a trendy alternative to Shoreditch. During the Olympics, he could hear the roar of crowds in the stadium from his studio.

Art Wednesday