David Tress: an artist of independent spirit

Like all artists of independent spirit, David Tress (born 1955) resists categorisation. He has been called a Romantic and a Neo-Romantic, a mixture of Impressionist and Expressionist, a traditionalist and a modernist, yet not one of these labels quite fits. He is all and none, drawing his inspiration from the great traditions of western art but principally from the British landscape that continues to evoke a response in him that can only find outlet through drawing and painting. Tress is a landscape painter and draughtsman of great poignancy, imbuing his dramatically coloured and vigorously constructed works with an emotional intensity that makes them difficult to ignore. He paints and draws on the thickest of watercolour papers, but frequently attacks the surface (with all kinds of tools and cutting implements) with such energy and fervour that he will penetrate right through and have to patch over, or under, another sheet before he carries on. This apparently mild-mannered man can work with a ferocity belied by his appearance — though when he starts to talk about the sources of his work, the passion that he channels into two-dimensions begins to emerge in a torrent of erudite conversation. A typical Tress painting is executed in mixed media on an irregularly shaped support (the overlapping sheets of paper are not squared off but frequently protrude and are allowed to bring a new dynamic to the picture), which usually depicts a landscape under very specific weather conditions. Although a representational painter, he is not a topographical realist. His pictures are not snapshots of nature, so much as ways of thinking about landscape. This more open approach allows his emotional response to the subject to direct the vibrant application of pastel or watercolour pencil that often overlays the paint. Tress is all too familiar with admirers of his work who are attracted by the more obvious aspects of his technique, what he calls ‘the frilly bits round the edges, the layers and the vigorous handling’, but who fail to recognise the hard work that has gone into arriving at the point when he is able to work with such freedom.