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Articles> David Alexander Cross
For more information about David Alexander Cross, please email him.
An egg against a blazing red background. Elsewhere, another egg, this one against muted shades of white. Several paintings later and the elemental, elliptical form has transformed, almost inevitably for this artist, into a raku pot.
Pots, jugs, mugs and bowls have featured strongly in David Alexander Cross’s paintings ever since he took up the practice of art in 2002. The containers represent David himself, he explains. They also address philosophical questions such as whether a vessel – or a life – is half empty or half full, just as they remind him of ‘what there is and what one has’.
These are all important issues for a retired gallery owner who lost everything when depression and suicidal thoughts began to grind him down 15 years ago. Unbeknownst to him, it was Alzheimer’s disease affecting his frame of mind, not some vague mid-life crisis, and when in 2002 he was diagnosed and placed on medication to counter the side effects of the disease, he felt well enough for the first time in years to invest in a new beginning.
This time, though, rather than sell art, he decided to make his own.
‘I’d always loved to draw,’ he says. ‘When I’d go on holiday I would have a sketch book in my pocket rather than a camera. And I studied art history at university and spent twenty-five years dealing in art, so I knew a little of what to look for. ’
Today, eight years on and married to soprano Sheila Barnes, David lives in Beccles, Suffolk, where he has enjoyed a number of concert-exhibitions in aid of Age Concern and the Alzheimer’s Society. As a dealer he had always admired paintings done in the naïve style and his first exhibition was Therapeutic Paintings; a series of works executed with the boldness and simplicity of the naïve genre.
Paintings need form, he feels, and in Lyme Regis where he used to live there was a bay with a beautiful, curving shape. This shape, together with a vessel of some sort, became key features in his earliest compositions. Then, when he began sailing on the Waveney River in his small boat, he came across a bend that was the inverse of the bay, and this became his next form.
‘I like the edges,’ he says of his canvases, ‘but I am not good with boundaries. I like a painting to be ongoing, and a part of a whole, and a part of life, but I also like the suspense of it coming to a conclusion.’
David speaks of the times when his mind goes blank; those frustrating moments when he can’t quite remember what he had been trying to say. Interestingly, these blanks do not occur when he is painting, he says, confirming in his mind the belief that Alzheimer’s does not affect the ability to appreciate or imagine. ‘When I am painting, my mind is quiet, focused, and there is continuity. As long as I am focused on the imagery, the Alzheimer’s doesn’t affect me.’
At the end of 2008 David and Sheila held a fund-raising concert and exhibition in their home concert room. This event was attended by New Zealand composer, Paul Sarcich, who was so taken with David’s story and artwork that he bought one of the paintings and surprised them by writing seven piano études in response to his favourite paintings.
What struck David most about the études was that Paul recognised, and was not afraid to capture, the fractured nature of the mind behind the paintings.
‘The paintings, taken as a set, show little in the way of the kind of organic development one associates with music,’ Paul writes in his notes about the compositions. ‘My approach was to take the most personally striking elements from each painting and to synthesize musical materials to match each étude, the overall result…hinting at the fracturing of identity caused by Alzheimer’s Disease.’
David was intrigued by this analysis, for he had always seen his naïve style and the repetition of certain forms as providing a coherence to his work. Never one to shun a challenge, he has decided to take the most fundamental of forms, the egg, and to use its sense of infinity to explore this challenge further.
Nothing is more important than peace, David writes in his foreword to his Therapeutic Paintings exhibition. And while he is painting, be it an egg or a pot or a window, any of which can represent hope, he has discovered his route into the much-needed happiness and contentment that comes with peace.
Other works by David:
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