About David Wilson

My creative interests began from the time I could hold a pencil in my hand. A love of art was cemented in high school, where I was exposed to the concepts of painting and the studio practice. Although mostly self-taught, during the mid-1990s I enhanced my technical proficiency via selected studies at what was then Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. Since then I have established a prolific career and a strong following in Western Canada.

It was experiencing firsthand the work of artists like Anselm Kieffer, Cy Twombly, and Alberto Giacometti that taught me the value of allowing my own work to spill on and off the canvas. Their diverse approach to painting revealed to me the value in relinquishing control; to allow the paint to run where it wants. My own practice primarily utilizes light, colour, and composition to create cityscapes reflecting the pulse and energy of urban life.

I prefer to use representational subjects as a jumping off point to explore the abstractions found within a given composition. Brushes, scrapers, rags, pencils, crayons, spray cans, various other mark-making tools—all are used to apply a variety of mediums to either canvas or board. Each painting comprises numerous layers of representation, text, and symbols that may or may not eliminate evidence of preceding layers. 

There is an underlying tension in the work that exists between my application of very wet paint and the surrendering of its control as it runs down the canvas. In my mind, life is very much like water in that it eventually finds its own balance and I see that reflected in the way I like to paint.

Over the past 15 years my work has been collected both nationally and internationally via an extensive exhibition history of both solo and group exhibitions. I work full time out of my studio within the renowned Parker Street Studios in Vancouver, BC.