David Heathcote (born 1931) is a contemporary painter whose work has been evolving for more than fifty years. He has lived in Kent since 1979, after working for eight years in Zimbabwe and twelve in northern Nigeria.
David has used a wide range of media in his work: oil and acrylic paint, collage, printing techniques, assemblage, clay and stone. Now he concentrates on oil paintings and small preliminary drawings for them.
David's current vivid, often highly abstracted, paintings explore themes of construction, colour and space. His paintings have always been essentially imaginative, though in the past he has regularly undertaken parallel, objective studies, particularly of the human figure, landscape, and sculpture and paintings in museums, though these were rarely consulted when it came to painting. In trying to sum up his own work he can only say, 'for me creativity is a journey where one is constantly meeting the unexpected. If things go well the composition attains a life and vitality of its own.' (If it doesn't it is destroyed!).
David trained at Canterbury College of Art, and later at the Slade under Claude Rogers and Keith Vaughan. A crucial moment for David as an artist was his first awareness of cubism while he was a student at the Slade. Africa has also left lasting impressions, affecting in oblique but forceful ways David's use of colour and form.
EXHIBITIONS
University of Kent at Canterbury, 2007
The Gallery in Cork Street, London, 2006
The Affordable Art Fair, Battersea, 2002
50-year Retrospective, Metropole Arts Centre, Folkestone, 2001
Canterbury Royal Museum, 1995
Edith Grove Gallery, London, 1994
Canterbury Festivals, 1993-2006
Gallery 202, London, 1990
Gallery Shurini, London, 1989
The Museum of Mankind, London, 1989
Loughborough College of Art, 1986
Brighton Polytechnic, (with Martyn Brewster), 1985
Ahmadu Bello University and British Council Galleries in Nigeria, 1967-78
National Gallery, Salisbury (now Harare), 1961-66
Meikles Gallery, Salisbury (now Harare), 1961
Young Contemporaries, 1958
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