David Carpanini PPRE Hon RWS

David Carpanini is one of Wales’ most well known and respected artists. He was born in the Afan Valley in Glamorgan in 1946 and trained at Gloucestershire College of Art, the Royal College of Art and the University of Reading. He held the post of Professor of Art at the University of Wolverhampton from 1992 to 2000.

David was the first Welsh President of the Royal Society of Painter – Printmakers. In 1969 he won the British Institution Awards Committee Annual Scholarship for engraving and has since exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy. He is also a member of the NEAC, Royal Watercolour Society and Royal Cambrian Academy. David has been associated with the Fosse Gallery before and has exhibited here in the past.

Although much of his adult life has been spent in England, his paintings, drawings and etchings are almost entirely 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 the 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 the 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 almost unnoticed by most of us.

Although solidly representational, his pictures speak eloquently of abstracts – fear, isolation and survival. They are set in Wales but the statements he makes are not confined to the Welsh valleys, the feelings they evoke are international.

David Carpanini’s work has been the subject of three television documentaries and is represented in numerous public, corporate and private collections worldwide.
Some of the prestigious collections which own his work are Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, Her Majesty the Queen, Windsor, Royal College of Art, National Museum of Wales Cardiff, The Permanent Collection of the Royal West of England Academy, The Welsh Mining Museum, The Ashmolean Museum Oxford and The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.