David Johnstone

David’s practice is rooted in painting but unfolds through a collision of media - traditional oils, spray paint, screen printing, collage, drawing, handwriting and graphic iconography.

With formal training in printed textiles and multimedia and a career in visual design, he approaches the canvas like a surface to be built, manipulated and layered. Repeating patterns, diagrams, grids, textures and fragments of visual culture operate like fabric, signage or stagecraft, a bricolage of dense, constructed images.

Each work balances finely rendered figures and features with gestural abstraction - splashes, drips, scribbles and scrawled annotations coexisting with moments of classical control. He is fascinated by life’s impermanence: the spectral, fragments and traces of things, vestiges of memory and how time can appear stretched, frozen, fractured and dreamlike.

Compositions suggest timelines and lifecycles, borrowing from the comic book frame and their sequential logic. They pause and hold images in suspended animation like film stills, pregnant with the before and after, asking what might happen when the viewer looks away.

Influenced by many — the classical geniuses Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer; the post-Impressionist work of Degas and Sickert; the modernists Warhol, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, and Johns; and the storytelling qualities of Rego — David creates surfaces that attempt to seduce, confuse, and critique in equal measure, telling stories in which beauty and anxiety share the same skin.

‘The Visitors’

A friend gifted David a book of late-19th-century photographs, of exquisite, sepia-toned portraits in the Carte Vista (‘visiting card’) style. Anonymised people who lived their lives as we do now and have long since vanished, became the catalyst for this ongoing series of oil paintings.

David says: ‘I treat these images as apparitions - echoes of human lives that once moved with the same urgencies, joys and anxieties as our own. The paintings become layered palimpsests where memory and historical residue blur into one another. They are phantasmagoric landscapes of the past, but also mirrors of our eventual disappearance: spectral reminders of how quickly a life becomes an artefact.

The surfaces accumulate glitches, distortions and pentimenti: evidence of revision, hesitation, malfunction. These marks acknowledge the impossibility of perfection in existence or in representation. They map the liminal territory between presence and erasure, where identity slips, mutates or fragments.

Through successive layers - added to, scraped back, reworked, written and printed upon- the paintings become both a relic and a record. They wrestle with the nature of impermanence, asking what traces remain and why do we hold onto the illusion that our stories endure?’