David Baumforth: 'Dark Skies and Sea'

By Greg McGee

David Baumforth: 'Dark Skies and Sea'

DAVID BAUMFORTH

David Baumforth was born in York in 1942 and paints the places he loves: the North Sea, its coastline and hinterland. Says Financial Times Art Critic William Packer, “Baumforth is a painter of sea and landscape who stands foursquare and unapologetic in the Romantic Turnerian tradition, but, as his powerfully evocative works make clear, it is to the later Turner of the near-abstract, apparently unfinished canvases and the rapid free intuitive watercolour studies, all mist and light and spray, with strange forms emerging from the shadows, that he is always looking.”

“Anyone who has an eye for art, the deep passionate colour of Turner, the pure loving observations of Constable, must rejoice that our century has David Baumforth. This work is the real thing, wet with sea spray we canfeel, fresh with gusts of wind, always mysterious, always beautiful.” Sister Wendy, art critic.
Here David tells us about a collection he is working on for an autumn exhibition at York's According to McGee, 'Dark Skies and Sea'.



"In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some of the greatest painters in the UK moved to Staithes for the exact same reason painters flocked to Normandy: the light found there is unique. Unlike Normandy, Staithes has on its doorstep the glowering beauty of the North Yorkshire Moors. It is this fusion of light and heft that has obsessed my painting for 60 years since I started out in York. I have enjoyed international success and like to think I have helped put North Yorkshire and its accompanying natural beauty on the cultural map.

 


David Baumforth at York's According to McGee


Recently I have begun to experiment with painted Yorkshire skyscapes focusing on the moments after sunset rather than the cerulean blue and wan gold of daylight. There are exhilarating currents of natural light to be found in North Yorkshire as the sun sinks and I have accepted this objective as my new and perhaps final artistic obsession. It is for this reason that I am working on 'Dark Skies and Sea' - all my life I have aimed to reinvent what paint can do and I feel that I can sufficiently innovate skyscapes to include the issues inspired by vision, bringing a Turnerian but contemporary energy to a bespoke collection of paintings, proving this medium is constantly evolving and has never been in better health."

 

David Baumforth, 2022

 

To view our David Baumforth collection, visit: https://accordingtomcgee.com/collections/david-baumforth