David Carpanini PPRE Hon RWS RWA. NEAC. Hon RBSA.

David Carpanini is one of Wales’ most well known and respected artists. He was in born in the Afan Valley in Glamorgan in 1946 and trained at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design in Cheltenham, the Royal College of Art and the University of Reading.

In 1969 he won the British Institution Awards Committee Annual Scholarship for Engraving and subsequently exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and in numerous other major group and solo exhibitions in the UK and abroad. David is a member of many prestigious groups and served as the first Welsh President of the Royal Society of Painter – Printmakers (RE) from 1995 to 2003. He held the post of Professor of Art at the University of Wolverhampton from 1992 to 2000.

Although much of his adult life has been spent in England, his paintings drawings and etchings have been largely devoted to the presentation of the valleys and former mining communities of South Wales where he was brought up. Lonely figures, scarred landscapes, perching terraces of houses and ragged roadside sheep are images to which he is faithful and to which he attributes the development of his creative imagination.

He is a painter and printmaker devoted to a plain complete statement which leaves little to chance and yet, if made with sufficient authority can distil poetry from those ordinary and everyday facts which can go unnoticed by most of us. Although solidly representational his pictures speak eloquently of abstracts – fear, isolation, loneliness, dignity, pride, hope and survival. They are often set in Wales but the statements he makes are not confined to the Welsh valleys, the feelings they evoke are international; concepts with which we can all identify regardless of our personal circumstances or background.

Being known as a watcher of people and observer of social circumstance has, however, never precluded him from engaging with subjects which can stimulate an understanding of other corners of reality. Indeed, he has always enjoyed the challenge of formal portrait commissions and often explored his Italian roots with serial drawings, etchings and paintings focussed in the towns and landscape of north and central Italy. Also, since his student days in Cheltenham, a long association with the Cotswolds, where he has now lived for some time, has underlined his natural contemplative instinct to quietly ponder the impact of changing weather conditions on familiar scenes and has resulted in a significant portfolio of landscape studies rarely exhibited or associated with his general professional practice.

David Carpanini’s work has been the subject of three television documentaries and is represented in numerous public, corporate and private collections worldwide.