Red Spot Gallery - Rotorua Art Gallery supporting local artists
David Woodings
David Woodings is a Christchurch based artist. His connection to the Photo Realist painting style of the American East Coast artists had its genesis in his viewing of the show American Photo Realism shown at the Barrington Gallery in Auckland in the early 1970’s. The photo-realist style has permeated his work ever since that date with underlying realist and social realist agendas.
David lived and worked in the Waikato during the ‘80’s and ‘90’s before moving south. David returned to full-time painting in 2005 and returned to his earlier photo-realist style with an interest in the banality of arcade machines within our architecturally bankrupt city malls. Where earlier arcade machines appeared as part features in paintings (as the cowboy horse in Walkway [Waikato Museum of Art and History collection]) they are now in the forefront of our relationship with the picture plane, connected both through scale and detail in such a way that we can’t help but consider the confrontational intrusion the object has into our personal space. The relationship is on a similar scale to that of a child/object interaction and he asks us, in these works, to look again as adults at these often well worn child pacifiers within the gloss and glass of our Arcadian pleasure palaces.