David Tress was born in London in 1955 and grew up
there, showing an early interest in painting, drawing
and natural history. After studying science with
biology at A-level, he changed direction and spent a
year at Harrow College of Art, before taking a Fine
Art degree course at Trent Polytechnic.
While he was at Trent, he became involved with
experiments in conceptual and performance art but
later, came to question the assumptions of
modernism. His rejection of modernism was,
however, not so much a return to the beginning, as
a rite of passage, which has brought
to his landscape and figurative painting some aspects of
abstraction retained from his earlier work.
David Tress has lived in West Wales since 1976, and the landscape of this part of Britain forms the subject of many of his paintings. He has exhibited in Wales, England, Ireland, France, Holland and America and has works in public collections including: The National Museum of Wales, The Contemporary Art Society for Wales, The National Library of Wales, MOMA Wales, The Guildhall Art Gallery City of London, and Pallant House Gallery Chichester.
In 1999, he was one of forty eight British artists and
designers commissioned by the Royal Mail to design
the Millennium special issue of stamps.
David Tress receiving the Glyndwr award for an outstanding contribution to the arts in Wales from Professor Tony Curtis. MOMA Wales, Machynlleth, August 2013.
'Tress works into Nature, clawing into his surfaces
in a mixture of media, creating a thicket of line or
impasto, removing it, retreating, beneath mobile,
airy skies. His practice is only marginally less
intuitive than Joan Eardley's in Aberdeenshire, in
sunlight or under snow, where the fickle weather,
hot or cold, was at the core of the work.
Tress is arguably the most recent consistent
contributor to expressionist landscape painting
from Wales…'
Julian Freeman, 'British Art. A walk round the rusty pier', South bank Publishing, 2006, p.126
In the studio 2007
Photograph: Marijke Braaksma
The studio 2008
Photograph: Marijke Braaksma
Photograph: Marijke Braaksma
Contact: info@messums.com
(Messages and requests for information will be forwarded to David Tress)