David Everett - October 2021
David Everett
Painter
By way of personal/artistic background:
Growing up in Providence and raised in a household that valued and practiced the arts, I actively drew and painted at a very young age to favorable reviews. We were the family without a television, and art and nature were my customary diversions. At age 10-11 I took art classes with the late painter Gino Conti at his magical carriage house on Planet Street, an experience that is etched in my memory and which helped hone my chops and shape my artistic vision. Spending weekends and parts of summers in Kent, Connecticut, I developed a keen interest in birds and spent a lot of time in the hills and woods on and around our property there. I continued to draw throughout my teens and beyond, mostly in the privacy of sketchbooks and notepads. With the original intention of majoring in studio art and English, I painted a bit in college, but found the instruction uninspired and drifted into other areas of study. An interest in landscapes, the built environment, and land conservation informed my continuing academic pursuits and an eventual career in land use planning, all the while influencing my artistic interests.
Taking a hiatus from college in New York, I worked as an environmental advocate before resuming my studies in urban studies, eventually earning a Master of City Planning at MIT. I then worked as a planning consultant, researcher, and small-town planner, primarily in Massachusetts and Connecticut, before returning to Providence, where I am a municipal planner to this day, concentrating on environmental and waterfront issues. Fieldwork and site visits have always been part of my professional work, and I like to think that interaction with different landscapes and coastlines informs my artwork.
I found my way back to painting by drawing in my shed, sometimes in freezing temperatures. Ideas generated from impressionistic landscape drawings led me to a desire to paint in earnest. A shared Eagle Square studio that was used as much for music as visual art inspired me to experiment and branch out; it was the kind of place one could paint on the walls, and I did. It was less about finished work than practice.
Around 2005 I really plunged into painting as my primary medium, with landscapes and seascapes my main subjects, inspired in large part by time spent in coastal Maine and the early 20th century work of Canadian painters Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven: their main inspiration was unadorned landscapes in places they knew intimately. Taking a similar approach, I depicted places I knew very well. I have painted on a consistent basis ever since in various studios, houses and apartments, producing hundreds of paintings and exploring different approaches and styles. Water-soluble oil paint became my preferred medium early on; it is easier to clean and odorless, but with some of the workable characteristics of traditional oil.
My early paintings depict rotting docks, old stone foundations, and other coastal infrastructure overgrown with seaweed and grasses, weathered by the elements, against backdrops of sea, sky and trees. Gradually, my subject matter tended toward the more wild and remote, traces of buildings, roads and other remnants of human life largely absent. Always, there were varying degrees of abstraction—and painting references became more remembered, composite, and imaginary, as opposed to being based on actual subjects. My work was displayed in eleven individual and group shows between 2009 and 2019 at venues around RI, exploring different presentation media and approaches while continuing to focus on landscapes and seascapes.
The onset of Covid presented new challenges, resulting in a year-long hiatus from painting and a lot of drawing in isolation, mostly ink landscapes veering into abstraction. As conditions improved and mobility became less constrained, I began to paint again and embarked on a new period marked by increasing abstraction and expanded color palettes, almost exclusively on square, unframed panels. The results are presented in this show, all of the paintings completed in 2021. I think it’s the most cohesive group of paintings I’ve ever shown.
David Everett