David Rees Davies

ELECTED ARWS 2025

David Rees Davies has always been captivated by the behaviours, habitats and folklores of the natural world. Along with his love of the wild is a deep and genuine interest in people, their personal histories, their visual idiosyncrasies and their quirks of personality. Finding ways to combine the complexities, humour and absurdities of the human condition with the innate and primal qualities of our animal counterparts is at the centre of the images he makes. Through visual juxtaposition, he tells stories of places and individuals, blending fact with fiction to create new metaphors through which to reflect on our place in the world.

He works intuitively through drawing, watercolour and oils, mixing acute objectivity with subjective choices of colour, mark and scale and merging reality with imagined scenarios. He often refers to the wonderful characters that populated his youth in South Wales and combine them with the natural world he see around him in the Sussex Downs where he now lives. Underlying everything that he does is an awareness that beauty and imperfection are non negotiable parts of both our visual world and our interior thoughts. It is in these disparate sources that he seeks out what can only be described as graphic poetry.

davidreesdavies.com