May FocusDavid Forster

David Forster’s intensely wrought landscape paintings refer to the traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Though the scenes depicted are topographically correct, light and colour are altered to create a fictionalised reality, that nonetheless conveys the authority of photo realist document.

By referring to older artistic traditions, the inheritance of narrative and emotional associations with landscape is evoked. However, at the core of the work is the idea of paradox, the contradictory pairing of ideas. This notion is emphasised through the adjustments made by the artist to the scene.

Thus the work presents the industrialised wilderness of farmland, the well-trodden solitude of the British uplands , or the tame sublime of the country park. In this way the importance of a romantic narrative of landscape is explored, one that tenaciously survives the knowledge of a more prosaic reality.