David Gluck; Yorkshire painter drawn to Italy
Hyfler/Rosner
Yorkshire painter drawn to Italy
http://www.newenglishartclub.co.uk/artists_pages/gluck_david.asp?art=49
http://www.thelondongroup.com/artists/gluck.html
The Independent
28 February 2007
Simon Fenwich
The artist David Gluck's work was informed by a pleasure in
the good things in life, but above all by an appreciation of
Italy and all that Italian culture, way of life and
landscape meant to him. A quintessential Yorkshireman, he
had a northerner's urge towards sunshine and the south.
Gluck was born in Pontefract in the West Riding. His
great-grandfather was an immigrant German stonemason and
both his grandfather and father were picture framers; he was
brought up surrounded by paintings, drawings and photographs
about to be framed. After leaving the King's Grammar School,
Pontefract, at the age of 17 he trained for three years at
Wakefield College of Art and then at Leeds College of Art,
where he met Sally Hallam, his future wife. In 1962 he went
to the Royal College of Art in London to take a Postgraduate
Diploma in Printmaking while Sally, also a painter, studied
at the Slade.
After graduation from the RCA Gluck set out on a very full
and active career as teacher and artist: he had a strong
belief that all teachers in art schools should themselves be
practising artists. His first post was at East Ham Technical
College; he later taught at Oxford Polytechnic and in
Canterbury and Epsom and at Goldsmiths College of Art.
In 1974 he was appointed Head of Printmaking at Central St
Martin's College of Art and Design - becoming Director of
Studies of the Fine Arts Course. For eight years, from 1985
to 1993, he was also a member of the Printmaking Panel of
the British School of Rome. Inevitably he found himself
caught up in the turbulent reorganisation of the London art
schools during the 1980s, times, he confessed, which sapped
the energy of all but the most creative. "The only way to
survive the pressure is to paint," he said.
On his retirement in 1994, Gluck left full-time teaching to
concentrate on his own work. He was elected a member of the
London Group, the New English Art Club, the Royal Society of
Painter-Printmakers and the Society of Landscape Painters.
At Leeds and the RCA he had been primarily interested in
printmaking (his prints have a particular mood and delicacy)
as well as photography and screen painting. Over the years,
however, he came to prefer working in watercolour. "Most
artists make a gradual progression," he wrote. "Artists have
to find out what they want to do and it's never easy." He
named as an influence the random blot technique of Alexander
Cozens, the 18th-century watercolourist.
In 1985 Gluck was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society,
for whom he was particularly active and supportive, serving
as Vice-President between 1999 and 2002. He also conducted
courses and demonstrations on the society's behalf but
lacked the tact necessary ever to serve as President.
Among the many prizes he won was the House and Garden Award
at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1988 (his winning
picture, Spring Sunlight in the Studio, was bought by the
film producer David Puttnam). In 2006, his landscape The
Evening Sunlight, Petrognano was awarded first prize in the
Singer and Friedlander/Sunday Times competition. By then he
already knew that he was terminally ill.
Although he held that ability to draw was of the greatest
importance, Gluck's pictures were also characterised by a
direct, vigorous approach creating a strong sense of
atmosphere. He worked when possible in front of the subject
in an instinctive, spontaneous manner, occasionally painting
as large as 60in by 40in in watercolour. His chosen subject
matter was landscape, still-life and interiors.
Year after year David and Sally Gluck returned to the tiny
Tuscan village of Petrognano in the hills near Lucca in
early May which was "colourful and fresh after long periods
of exceptional rain, with an array of flowers everywhere -
by roadsides, in gardens, and in the landscape", staying for
up to a month at a time. He would start painting at seven in
the morning, sketching between five and 10 postcards on the
first day of what he called field trips (the cards were
later given away to friends or kept for reference).
After these "warm-up sessions" he painted over a period of
up to a week, in about one-and-a-half-hour stages at very
specific times - working on one painting in the morning,
another in the afternoon, in order to catch the shadows, as
they fell regularly each day - the great advantage of
painting in Italy over England. In 1996 he held a one-man
exhibition in London under the title "O Sole Mio".
Gluck's former studio at St Katherine's Dock having been
requisitioned when the site was redeveloped, he had his new
studio in what should have been the main bedroom of his
house in Herne Hill, a house that was kept deliberately
slightly neglected - unchanged from the time it had first
been bought. A room on the ground floor housed a printing
press, while stacked around the house were picture frames:
he framed all his own work, continuing the family tradition.
There he and his wife entertained friends for Italian
evenings, rigging up lighting and a sound system to serve
Italian food and wine to the sound of Verdi and Puccini.
Despite David Gluck's sometimes brusque manner, he was
immensely kind-hearted and he and Sally enjoyed a
particularly close marriage, supporting one another in
recent years as each suffered from cancer.
Simon Fenwick
David Gluck, painter: born Pontefract, West Yorkshire 29
October 1939; married 1963 Sally Hallam (died 2006); died
London 17 February 2007.
Hyfler/Rosner
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
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> David Gluck
> Yorkshire painter drawn to Italy
> http://www.newenglishartclub.co.uk/artists_pages/gluck_david.asp?art=49
> http://www.thelondongroup.com/artists/gluck.html
>
> The Independent
> 28 February 2007
> Simon Fenwich
>
From The Sunday Times
September 03, 2006
Art: Singer & Friedlander watercolour competition
Dedication's what you need if you want to be a winner in the
Singer & Friedlander-Sunday Times watercolour competition,
says Frank Whitford
David Gluck
The Evening Sunlight, Petrognano, near Lucca, Italy
Winner: £15,000
This may look like a traditionally conceived watercolour,
and it does indeed have many of the qualities of one. The
subject's pretty traditional, too: a southern European
landscape in a heat haze. What's more, the painting was
based on drawings and a study done on the spot. Yet, unlike
a conventional watercolourist, David Gluck prefers not to
plan each painting in advance, carefully working out each
move in his head because, with watercolour, backtracking is
difficult, if not impossible. Gluck's method is quite
different. Rather than think ahead, he likes to respond to
an image that's evolving as he works. "I begin simply by
making marks. So, halfway through, the picture might not
look anything like the intended subject, and the colours can
seem quite bizarre. Then, as I apply layer after layer,
responding to a developing image, they come increasingly to
resemble what it is that I'm looking at and ultimately
depicting." This approach is partly the result of Gluck's
interest in Alexander Cozens's method involving random blot
images, which the latter publicised in the 18th century. But
if accident plays an important part in the process, how can
the painting have anything to do with a real, existing
motif? This picture certainly has to do with a specific
location. "I know this Italian village well. I spent a month
or more there for about 10 years running, painting every
day. I wanted the picture to convey a strong sense of the
place and atmosphere. But the painting was made in the way I've
described, and I believe that this way of working gives a
unique quality to the watercolour." The painting was started
on the spot, then continued for a few hours every day, so as
to be able to work with similar light conditions. Then it
was finished off in the studio. "The aim was to maintain the
vigour and excitement of those first sessions throughout."
Gluck's unconventional methods have to do with the fact that
he trained as a printmaker and taught printmaking at the
Central School of Art for years. But he began to draw more
intensively again, and to paint seriously in watercolours.
(He's not an artist for whom watercolour is an adjunct to
oils.) "I remember when I started. In about 1975, we were
moving from one house to another in south London and I
decided to paint the old place, so I did a watercolour of
it. That got me going. So I've been painting more or less
like this for some 30 years." Gluck has concentrated on
watercolours (and drawing and etching) ever since. For two
decades, he's been a member of the Royal Watercolour Society
and has been the vice president of the RWS, too. So it must
have been simply an oversight of the judges that Gluck hadn't
won a prize in the competition before. He's sent in enough
work, heaven knows - almost every year, with one or two
exceptions. Mind you, it must be some compensation that the
first prize he's been awarded is a first.