DAVID's ABSTRACTION

Yellow Grind 1967-72

David Haughton's intense, methodical and detailed calligraphy is a reflection of his intense engagement with painting. It also mirrors the many years of David's careful scrutiny and awareness of what interested him most in life, and about art and the activity of painting.

From early block paintings which configure the cottages and farm buildings of West Penwith but with a nod towards the Modernist abstraction of the period, we see David quickly develop a detailed short hand of marks and lines which conjured upon paper the mass of detail which confronted him in the views and aspects of St Just and other places he chose to portray. 

This search for a meaningful calligraphy feeds into and later, out of, his abstract works of the sixties. For by the mid seventies David had returned to figurative renderings of St Just using the original drawings he had made in the late fifties.

These drawings of fine detail, quite unlike the sketches of any other artist I know, could be seen rolled up and stored on wooden racks and shelving in his somewhat cramped studio space when during the mid and late seventies, myself and other painting students from the Central School of Art were treated to his famously hot curries, late into the evening, at his home in Holland Park. 

The drawings had been like "money in the bank," David told me, and he told me how colours and marks bleeding through the canvas to the reverse side of his paintings had inspired the calligraphy of his abstract work.

"One day.. I looked at the back of a canvas and saw strange patterns which were partly the weave of the canvas and partly something else that was happening. I took up a piece of charcoal and began to draw..."

That, and his curiosity about the everyday world around him, for example, the cast-iron drain and man-hole covers he encountered in the street on his way to the tube station!

Grids inevitably found their way into the scheme of things;

"The lines slowed things up, and then gradually the grids started for me a purely corrective exercise, which changed appearances and made one reassess what one had done."

David recalled he was fascinated by the implications and ancestry of such a direction, citing the medieval paintings at the V&A and the comics read as a child; 

"Little pictures which would make up a complete picture."

The result was a series of fine canvases such as 'Sunspot' and 'Tangerine' exhibited at the Hayward Gallery as part of BRITISH PAINTING '74.

John Halkes, a previous director of the Newlyn Gallery, described David's journey in paint thus:

"Haughton’s early works of St Just were detailed celebrations of its cottages, backyards, chapels and windy streets. The drawings and etchings in particular were packed with observation while remaining briskly free of sentimentality. During the late Sixties, his close involvement with the essential matter and light of the place led to a series of large abstract paintings which had a religious intensity. Their subtle multi-faceted devices and motifs echoed the fall of light on quartz-veined granite: the stuff of which Cornwall is built. By 1979, when he had a major retrospective touring exhibition mounted by Newlyn Orion, the imagery had once again become figurative."

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