Throughout a professional career beginning in the 1980’s David Lucas has exhibited widely in public and private galleries, art fairs and ‘alternative’ exhibition spaces. His work has been met with critical acclaim and is held in many collections world wide. He has been successful in achieving a number of awards including a major grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in recognition of his achievements and high calibre as an artist.
A broad interest in the natural world, astrophysics and philosophy has inspired his outlook and creative process. Recent bodies of painting have explored themes around skies, sea, land, horizons, rainbows, space, light and shadow. Lucas’s visual language involves expressive painterly abstraction, using intense colour, contour and shape.
He attempts to unravel the experience of the moment from both external and internal points of view. His creative process incorporates a superstructure and the accidental potential within it. The tension between controlling the image and allowing chance to play its part is essentially the subject and source of power in the work.
Strong connections with the counties of Yorkshire and Cumbria, with their extensive areas of lakes and mountains, Pennine moorland and dramatic coastlines have informed and influenced the artist’s inner mental landscape. The subtle light, tone and character finds its way into the paintings.
The latest body of painting has seen the artist return to his roots and early inspiration, the landscape of north Cumbria with the Solway plain looking across the Solway firth to the lowland fells of south west Scotland on one side, and the northern fells of the Lake District on the other. A deep rooted relationship with this landscape, its unique character and quality of light, western skies and striking sunsets being instrumental in forming his artistic outlook. Emerging out of the ‘Shaft of Light’ series the ‘Solway’ series has sought to reconnect with a landscape somewhat overshadowed by the Lake District National Park.