Dave Pearson (painter)
David Samuel Pearson (4 August 1937 – 19 July 2008), commonly known as "Dave Pearson", was an English painter and educator who was "a great example of an artist whose life was completely dedicated to serving the imagination".[1] Highly prolific, throughout his life he produced a prodigious quantity of work.
Life
Dave Pearson was born in Clapton, London in 1937. His father, Sam, was a tailor and his mother Ann went on, in later life, to become a prolific self-taught artist. Pearson was evacuated to
He went on to study painting at both
Work
In 1959 Dave Pearson exhibited as part of the Young Contemporaries exhibition in London, and followed this with an exhibition Astronauts at the New Arts Centre.
Shortly after his move to Manchester his work was based on the work of
Inspired by the
As well as literary sources, other themes for his work have included Palmers Yard and the
During his life he produced well over 13,000 pieces of work.[4] Adrian Henri, in Environments and Happenings noted his obsessional quality, and went on to describe Dave (in 1974) as "one of the most exciting new artists around".[5]
The estate was inherited by Dave Pearson's son Christopher, who made over the artwork to a trust, the Dave Pearson Trust. The estate was returned to Christopher Pearson in 2018.
Teaching
For much of his working life Pearson was a lecturer, and later Senior Lecturer, in the Department of Fine Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, 1964–2002. As an artist he was unusually productive and passionate, and he encouraged and nurtured these qualities in his students throughout his long teaching career. As the painter Stuart Bradshaw commented "Dave the teacher was much less of a teacher than Dave the artist." If Pearson was a great exemplar of what an artist is, he was also no respecter of budgets, bureaucracy or limitations of any kind and was renowned for his ability to use a whole year's worth of course materials in a week-long project.[1]
Posthumous developments
The Dave Pearson Trust rescued Pearson's studio in
As a result of this, and the involvement of the critic, writer and poet, Edward Lucie-Smith, there was a large exhibition of Pearson's work at the Bermondsey Project gallery in London, in April/May 2012.[7] Several other exhibitions have followed from this, and another large-scale exhibition at the Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, in Summer 2018 that showed work originally hung in the same space in 1994.[8]
In 2009 the Trust completed its cataloguing of the artist's work and started operating as The Dave Pearson Studio.[9]
Public Collections
- Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool (3 works)
- Royal Blackburn Hospital
- The Museum of English Rural Life(6 works)
- The Whitaker, Rawtenstall
References
- ^ a b c Mytton, Margaret (4 November 2008). "Obituary: Dave Pearson". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 October 2009.
- ^ M.Mytton, Press Release – Manchester Metropolitan University 1997
- ^ Catalogue – Byzantium; Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, 1994
- ^ D.S.Pearson Catalogue of Work/Bob Frith 2008
- ISBN 0-500-18143-8
- ^ "'To Byzantium' now available on Freeview". An Artist's Estate blog. Blogspot. 17 September 2014.
- ISBN 978-0-9572306-0-6
- ^ Dave Pearson: Return to Byzantium; pub. The Turnpike; 2018.
- ^ "Dave Pearson Studio". D S Pearson.