Bio
David Caldwell was born in Helensburgh in the West of Scotland in 1977. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art (1994-98) and the Royal Drawing School (2003-05). He has won several awards and residencies including the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ Bulldog Bursary, the Founder’s Purchase Prize at the ING Discerning Eye (adjudged by the late Brian Sewell), and the Smallwood Architects Prize at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition 2019.
He has twice been short-listed for the BP Portrait Awards, where in 2013 he displayed 77 miniature portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.
He has recently been short-listed for various other major awards including the Seven Investments Management ‘Conversations’ Prize, the Ruth Borchard Self-portrait Prize, the Threadneedle Figurative Art Prize, the Lynn Painter-Stainers Award and the W. Gordon Smith Award. David lives and works as an artist and portrait painter in Glasgow.
About my work
I paint from life in oils. My work reflects my immediate environment and features the people, landscapes and things that I directly engage with.
I strive to make something permanent of the fleeting, to build layers of time and looking into one distilled image.
Whilst my work is rooted in the real world, I am also preoccupied with the duality of figuration and abstraction within painting. My work is concerned with composition and the balance of colour and tonal relationships, whilst simultaneously striving for a ‘truthful’ representation of the subject.
I select from nature, not in order to make a copy, rather to find an equivalent in parallel to nature, one with its own rules and its own solutions. I rely on intuition and instinct to guide me. Each painting is its own journey and I try to surrender to the process in order to uncover something new and unforeseen.
Whilst painting, time disappears, one is ‘in the moment”. The myriad relationships within nature and painting are chased and recorded in an endless conversation. The resulting works survive as evidence of these encounters, their brush-strokes tracking the thoughts and actions of the artist.