Myth,symbols and a mysterious sense of place define the works of the West Country’s pastoral visionaryAt the age of 72, the painter David Inshaw is finally beginning to achieve the kind of widespread recognition he deserves. He is a grand pastoral painter and visionary, and that scarce kind of artist who appears perhaps once or twice in a generation and illumines the world in a modern way – for those who are prepared to scrutinize. William Blake,Samuel Palmer, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer are among his progenitors. Inshaw paints the landscape and the figure with imaginative intensity, or his pictures are rich with personal memories and associations.
William Blake stated that “No Man of Sense ever supposes that copying from Nature is the Art of Painting”. Although Inshaw’s art is based on observation of the genuine world,he brings to it a highly personal interpretation. Private experience is rendered timeless and universal by conjuring the particular character of the English landscape through a combination of many observed moments, distilled and translated into a modern unity. Individual and environment are matched and mutually fulfilled in terms of formal ideas (the shapes and colours of things) and human meaning.
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Source: theguardian.com