“Through my painting I aim to express something of the sensory experience of being in the landscape. Living and working in the far west of Cornwall is uniquely inspirational. Daily walks on the coast path near my studio provide a visual stimulation that can’t help but find its way onto the canvas. Textures, colours, shapes, sounds, movements and spaces collide to create a wealth of visual and spatial relationships in constant flux. This is my source. The work is both an emotional response to the natural environment and an attempt to communicate a sense of the freedom, the vastness, the rhythm and the ebb and flow of nature, which is characteristic to this part of Cornwall. I work in an intuitive and gestural way, burying and unearthing marks and textures through an energetic process of destruction and excavation, which mirrors the acts of nature on the landscape. Through the process I explore surface, shape, colour, texture, composition and mark making in order to articulate and form images which express my experiences in the Cornish landscape”
David Mankin lives and works in the south west of Cornwall. His dynamic and vivid abstracted Cornish landscape paintings have been exhibited in Cornwall, Scotland and London and he has shown in a number of London art fairs.
His paintings are in numerous private and corporate art collections around the world including office spaces in Paris and South Africa.
The book ‘Remembering in Paint’ written by Kate Reeve-Edwards, with a foreword by Sarah Brittain-Mansbridge, was published by Sansom Press in 2021 and is an extensive and beautifully produced publication about the work of David Mankin. In 2019, English Heritage commissioned David to produce a painting in response to Tintagel and the work was reproduced on the cover of their members handbook. In 2022 David was invited to do an artist residency at Pouch Cove in Newfoundland.