DAVID WEBB - Painter, UK

El Fuerte
oil on canvas
40 x 40cm
2005

Grey Iris
oil on board
36.5 x 30cm
2006

DAVID WEBB

New Paintings

Somewhere in Cahiers d’Art Braque comments that the only thing that matters about a painting is that which cannot be put into words. What Braque is saying is that a good painting by-passes verbalisation, operates entirely through the eyes, between painter and observer. A painting may be recognised or identified long before it is literally understood.

It is arguable also, that what matters as well is what persists in the observer’s mind once the looking is over, the nutritive power that the memory of a painting may have.

A painter worth his salt takes risks. The risks that David Webb takes in his work are those of non-confrontational, apparent simplicity, of quiet subtlety of colour and facture allied to a lean pictorial formality. Yet these natural-looking paintings repay a long and hard look. There is nothing here of proficient bravura or the esprit of the immediately optical, as of a clever conjuring trick. Instead, what in other hands could be merely dumb or tasteful, here become visual statements which both defy easy analysis and yet which stay in the mind.

Close inspection shows that these images are hard-won. A barely detectable, remote red can glimmer through a charcoal with just enough facture to keep the surface alive. Webb has an enviable feel for the way paint behaves. In Suez, for example, an essentially conventional landscape-type composition is given life entirely through the interplay of greeny-greys, near-earth sepias, and just sufficiently brushy mark-making. Without in any way being melancholic, these paintings are subdued yet affirmative. Slow-burners, if you like, their apparent softness is often built round a steely sense of scale.

The old figurative versus non-representational debate is yesterday’s argument and Webb moves easily around in this territory. What unifies this air-filled opus is an instinctive feel for natural light without in any sense being depictive of the particular. Even at their least referential, whatever the image, the work is grounded in a felt reality.

It may well be the case that in the society of which we are a part, it is no longer desirable, or even possible, to try to tell other people anything of much importance. The day of the proselytizing ‘genius’ is over and a latter-day Wagner, for example, would have no place in 2009. All that is necessary is for the artist to be (Braque: “With age, art and life become one”) rather than to seek attention by performing (Picasso often?). Webb, ambitious, totally professional and highly focussed as he is, in being uncompromisingly himself, exactly fits the bill as a painter of our time.

Cuillin Bantock

January, 2009

See David Webb's work at:
http://www.aptstudios.org/artists/DW/index.html