David Whitaker; Abstract artist
Hyfler/Rosner
Abstract artist of technical daring
http://www.gallery286.com/whitaker/img7.html
http://www.thelondongroup.com/artists/whitaker.html
The Independent
20 March 2007
Rebecca Hossack
David Whitaker, artist: born Blackpool 8 June 1939; married
1959 Frances Wood (three sons); died Kingston upon Thames,
Surrey 15 March 2007.
David Whitaker was a painter who over the course of his
career extended the range and resonance of Abstract Art.
During the late 1960s, immediately after he left the Royal
Academy Schools and while Bridget Riley was establishing a
reputation through her exploration of the optical effects of
line in her black-and-white works, he was investigating the
optical effects of colour in paintings of extraordinary
technical accomplishment and daring.
In Whitaker's paintings the colour of each of the vertical
(or, more rarely, horizontal) bands that covered the canvas
would imperceptibly shift and change over the course of its
length. The resulting image appeared to pulse with light.
Shapes would float free from the geometric mesh. Cool
colours, that the viewer might expect to recede, would
spring suddenly forward.
The ambition and the control of these strikingly beautiful
effects were things that he continued to develop. He even
managed to achieve his minutely graduated effects in
watercolour.
David Whitaker was born in Blackpool in 1939. After showing
an early aptitude for painting, he was enrolled, at the age
of 13, as a junior student at Blackpool Art School. Obliged
to leave there after six years of study after his father
became incapacitated by multiple sclerosis, he found work in
London as a graphic designer.
Having married early, and with two (later, three) children
to support, he was nevertheless determined to become a
painter. He abandoned magazine design and took a job as a
milkman, so that he could have time to paint in the
afternoons. In 1962 he was accepted as a mature student at
the Royal Academy Schools, where - after a further four
years of study - he was awarded a Distinction in Painting.
During his time at the RA, he worked - as an experiment - on
alternate days, on the same canvas with his fellow student,
David Inshaw. At that stage Inshaw was an abstract painter
and Whitaker a figurative one. By the end of the experiment,
their roles had reversed.
Whitaker's interest in Op Art began on his leaving the RA,
and his work enjoyed early success. He had been awarded a
Young Contemporaries Prize in 1964, he exhibited at the
Kingston Art Gallery and was included in several Arts
Council touring shows. In 1970 he became one of the first
British artists to have a solo exhibition at the Serpentine
Gallery, London. In 1973 - on the recommendation of Bridget
Riley - he received the Mark Rothko Memorial Award, spending
several fruitful months working in America.
On holiday in Egypt in the late 1970s he was dazzled by the
grave-paintings in the Valley of the Kings, consummate works
of art that were created in the expectation that they would
never be seen by human eyes. Something of that austere
self-denying idealism infected his own attitude to his
practice over the next two decades.
The demands of family life drew him more and more into
teaching. From 1984 to 2001 he was a dedicated and
much-loved tutor at Wimbledon School of Art. He continued
with his own painting, but exhibited only occasionally, and
not with commercial galleries. He had one-person shows in
public galleries in France (Amiens) and America (Oakland),
as well as at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, and at the
Newcastle Polytechnic gallery.
He was elected a member of the London Group in 1989 and a
Fellow of the Royal Watercolour Society in 2004. In 1996 he
became one of the first abstract painters to win a prize at
the Hunting Art Prizes, and achieved the same distinction
when he won a prize at the Singer Friedlander National
Watercolour competition in 2001. These were only a few of
the many awards that his work received.
Whitaker's work excited the interest of commercial
galleries. And with the coming of the new millennium
Whitaker began exhibiting regularly again in London. The
dynamism, beauty and technical accomplishment of his
painting - when seen by a wider public - won many admirers.
Although institutional support was slow to catch up, his
work is in the collections of the Arts Council of Great
Britain, York City Art Gallery and the National Gallery of
Iceland.
A man of great gentleness and charm, he brought a scrupulous
care to everything he undertook. He was a considerable
athlete. A long-time member of the Kingston Stragglers, he
ran marathons until almost the last year of his life.