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David Shutt is an artist of passionate integrity who revels in the beauty of appearances. He sees painting as a process of identification and revelation rather than dry classification; and as a way of apprehending the world. Though there is a scientific precision and intellectual rigour to the artist’s research, and an undeniably serious intent, the work is essentially celebratory rather than analytical. His paintings and drawings are descriptive of Shutt’s experience of looking at the world, and the pleasure he takes in it.

Andrew Lambirth
The London Group 90th Anniversary Exhibition Catalogue 2004

ARTISTS STATEMENT

I came to Greece looking for a quality of light and a context for philosophical ideas which have their origins here, in the hope of making a unified image which celebrated both. The artists who have influenced me most, in a direct way, are the English painters Sir William Coldstream, Norman Norris, Patrick Symons and Euan Uglow, initially at the Slade and later more personally. They made me aware, amongst other things, of the work of Jay Hambidge who published two books in the early 20th Century: “The Greek Vase” and “The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry”. He had been a keeper of the substantial collection of Greek ceramics in Boston Museum and had recognised the superior beauty and harmony of the pieces in the collection of the classical period of the age of Pericles, over the less integrated earlier, and later Hellenistic works.

He started measuring them and discovered those works to possess very particular qualities of proportion which are mathematically associated with Pythagorean ideas, which have come down to us in Plato’s “Timaeus”. They are especially present in the “divine” platonic solid, the dodecahedron, as opposed to those associated with the four elements and Plato’s atomic theory: the cube, the tetrahedron, the octahedron and the icosahedron. The dodecahedron possesses the ratio of the golden section since it is composed of pentagonal facets whose chords intersect each other in that ratio and this is the basis of the cosmos, to be found throughout nature in philotaxis (the organising principal of plants), animal growth and musical structure, in the Pythagorean world view. It is a very appealing poetic and pantheistic idea.

For many years I have been interested in ideas of figure composition and pastoral landscape which also have their origins here in Greece. The idea of the self-confident, self aware and integrated nude has its first full manifestation in Greek sculpture and the most appealing context for the nude is Arcadia, celebrated in the paintings of Titian, Claude, Poussin, Cézanne and Matisse. For twenty years I have painted the upland region of Snowdonia, a sheep rearing landscape of North Wales, and having developed a deep devotion to a particular locality since childhood, have come to think of it as a personal arcadia, which has many shared characteristics in common with the geographic Arcadia in Greece. Because many of Cézanne’s figure compositions are based on the story of Diana (Artemis) and Callisto as told by Ovid in his “Metamorphosis” I painted a number of compositions loosely based on those events. To research the quality of light appropriate to the story, set in Arcadia, I painted in Mediterranean locations in France (near Cézanne’s Mte St Victoire), Italy, Spain, Portugal, Malta, Egypt and now in Greece.

A friend and fellow painter, Trevor Felcey, had painted in Greece twenty years ago, in a locality between Galatas and Epidavros in the Argolid. A relative of his then partner, also an English painter, Aelred Bartlett, had built a studio house in a remote bay shortly after the second world war, on the advice of Robert Liddell (author of “Aegean Greece”). I paint here from the marvellous landscapes and in the nearby archaeological site of Troezen, associated with Orestes, Theseus, Hippolytus and Phaedra. The changing cycle of the seasons and the way the vegetation, environment and light changes, have become the subjects of my studies, which informed the “Artemis and Callisto” composition and more recently Dionysian celebrations in the Trizina “Devil’s Gorge”, an ancient sanctuary to Bacchus .

This may explain why "Plane Trees by a Spring" is composed in a pentagon, "Looking Up and Down the Gorge" is in a golden section and "Bacchanalian Revel" is in the square root of a golden section, and "Wide View of a Plane Tree to the Sea" is in three squares. Most of these images are in the Red Catalogue on this website. The internal dynamics of these shapes have given their coherence to the subjects. From the subject, the shape of the canvas becomes the outward manifestation of the space it occupies and the glow of colour and light which infuse this marvellous place.

	Gallery	About the Artist	Catalogue


	David Shutt is an artist of passionate integrity who revels in the beauty of appearances. He sees painting as a process of identification and revelation rather than dry classification; and as a way of apprehending the world. Though there is a scientific precision and intellectual rigour to the artist’s research, and an undeniably serious intent, the work is essentially celebratory rather than analytical. His paintings and drawings are descriptive of Shutt’s experience of looking at the world, and the pleasure he takes in it. Andrew Lambirth The London Group 90th Anniversary Exhibition Catalogue 2004



	David Shutt is represented in the UK by the Kapil Jariwala Gallery (contact) and in Greece by Jill Yakas (contact)


ARTISTS STATEMENT
I came to Greece looking for a quality of light and a context for philosophical ideas which have their origins here, in the hope of making a unified image which celebrated both. The artists who have influenced me most, in a direct way, are the English painters Sir William Coldstream, Norman Norris, Patrick Symons and Euan Uglow, initially at the Slade and later more personally. They made me aware, amongst other things, of the work of Jay Hambidge who published two books in the early 20th Century: “The Greek Vase” and “The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry”. He had been a keeper of the substantial collection of Greek ceramics in Boston Museum and had recognised the superior beauty and harmony of the pieces in the collection of the classical period of the age of Pericles, over the less integrated earlier, and later Hellenistic works. He started measuring them and discovered those works to possess very particular qualities of proportion which are mathematically associated with Pythagorean ideas, which have come down to us in Plato’s “Timaeus”. They are especially present in the “divine” platonic solid, the dodecahedron, as opposed to those associated with the four elements and Plato’s atomic theory: the cube, the tetrahedron, the octahedron and the icosahedron. The dodecahedron possesses the ratio of the golden section since it is composed of pentagonal facets whose chords intersect each other in that ratio and this is the basis of the cosmos, to be found throughout nature in philotaxis (the organising principal of plants), animal growth and musical structure, in the Pythagorean world view. It is a very appealing poetic and pantheistic idea. For many years I have been interested in ideas of figure composition and pastoral landscape which also have their origins here in Greece. The idea of the self-confident, self aware and integrated nude has its first full manifestation in Greek sculpture and the most appealing context for the nude is Arcadia, celebrated in the paintings of Titian, Claude, Poussin, Cézanne and Matisse. For twenty years I have painted the upland region of Snowdonia, a sheep rearing landscape of North Wales, and having developed a deep devotion to a particular locality since childhood, have come to think of it as a personal arcadia, which has many shared characteristics in common with the geographic Arcadia in Greece. Because many of Cézanne’s figure compositions are based on the story of Diana (Artemis) and Callisto as told by Ovid in his “Metamorphosis” I painted a number of compositions loosely based on those events. To research the quality of light appropriate to the story, set in Arcadia, I painted in Mediterranean locations in France (near Cézanne’s Mte St Victoire), Italy, Spain, Portugal, Malta, Egypt and now in Greece. A friend and fellow painter, Trevor Felcey, had painted in Greece twenty years ago, in a locality between Galatas and Epidavros in the Argolid. A relative of his then partner, also an English painter, Aelred Bartlett, had built a studio house in a remote bay shortly after the second world war, on the advice of Robert Liddell (author of “Aegean Greece”). I paint here from the marvellous landscapes and in the nearby archaeological site of Troezen, associated with Orestes, Theseus, Hippolytus and Phaedra. The changing cycle of the seasons and the way the vegetation, environment and light changes, have become the subjects of my studies, which informed the “Artemis and Callisto” composition and more recently Dionysian celebrations in the Trizina “Devil’s Gorge”, an ancient sanctuary to Bacchus . This may explain why "Plane Trees by a Spring" is composed in a pentagon, "Looking Up and Down the Gorge" is in a golden section and "Bacchanalian Revel" is in the square root of a golden section, and "Wide View of a Plane Tree to the Sea" is in three squares. Most of these images are in the Red Catalogue on this website. The internal dynamics of these shapes have given their coherence to the subjects. From the subject, the shape of the canvas becomes the outward manifestation of the space it occupies and the glow of colour and light which infuse this marvellous place.