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David Hayward

David Hayward spent his early years in rural mid-Wales before studying art at Cheltenham, Canterbury, Brighton, and the Royal College. He was a Professor & Deputy Head of College at the University for the Creative Arts and Professor of Visual Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University. David left academia in 2009 to pursue his own creative practice and has a studio in the Kent Downs.

Primarily an abstract painter, David uses his interest in the morphology of landscapes and the peculiarities of specific locations to inform his work. In his most recent body of work focused on the shorelines around Whitstable, Seasalter, and Oare, this translates as a painterly contemplation on the marginality of shorelines and estuaries with their horizontal delineations of air, water, and land and the transient nature of weather, erosion, and the detritus of tidelines. But rather than depict these places topographically, he uses them to explore how such physicality and transience might be reflected through the qualities and colour of a painting’s surface.

It is an interest in surface qualities that led David to use encaustic as his primary medium. The process allows him to manipulate surfaces by incising and scraping away layers to reveal underpainting, or by embedding discarded fragments from earlier work back into a painting’s surface. These acts of burying and excavating, embedding and revealing offer painterly parallels to the way landscape contains evidence of its own formation.