"What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity, serenity devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter... like a comforting influence, a mental balm". Henri Matisse

David Platts is reluctant to talk about his work as he believes very strongly that the work should speak for itself. It should be approached with an open mind uncluttered by any preconceptions or wordy explanations. These can often get in the way and prevent the viewer from experiencing the work at first hand with an open heart, so that its magic and metaphysical nature can sing freely to the receptive soul.

The art of David Platts is profoundly contemplative and metaphoric. Industrial coach enamels and household paints (which first made their appearance in his work in the 1960's) are used alongside the more traditional media of watercolour, gouache, oil and acrylic. He works from a premise of "an order in space" and every stage of the making of the artefact is meticulously controlled. The motif of either single or multiple fully interlocking shapes is developed with numerous permutations and combinations. The picture plane, its boundaries and surround are considered as a whole: the frame is conceived as an integral part of the painting, the image sometimes growing organically beyond the generally accepted boundaries of the picture surface onto the frame. His work is no random abstraction from the concrete world that we inhabit but a distillation of life's experiences rendered in paint - the rhythms, the ‘quicknesses', the ‘stillnesses' which characterize the human condition.

Through colour, line, form and texture David Platts expresses profound degrees of feeling, the scale and intensity of which vary in nature as a sonata may vary from a symphony.

2007

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