David Cobley is an British portrait and figurative painter born in 1954 and is the founder of Bath’s Art Studio’s. Cobley has several work pieces in galleries and museums to date including his portrait of Ken Dodd which is in The National Portrait Gallery in London.
Several of his artwork stands out for me and relates to my work, a few examples of these are ‘A bit like Daimen Hirst’, ‘Edward’, ‘Professor Kevin Gournay’, ‘The Philanthropist’, ‘The Blacksmith’ and a few more (photos of these below).
His piece ‘Professor Kevin Gournay’ relates most to my work as its of an elderly male, big features, lines and dents within the face as well as a lot of detail along with the paint work. The portrait has a lot of strong bold colours and highlights, as well as dark thin lines for details and wrinkles within the face. This is what inspired me to use a soft thin brush for my most recent colour painting and I think it worked really well, I will continue to practice with this technique to see where it takes my own work. In the Professor Kevin Gournay painting he has captured the character and personality of the model amazingly, got the stand correct which says a lot about the model. I think the shadows on his face are perfectly placed and show a real depth that creates an effect of 3D. I also noticed the fact the background and clothes match, it is like they are colour coded which is also what I need to improve on my own paintings. I feel like my paintings don’t have the finished effect that artists like Cobley and Freud do because of my lack of backgrounds or background colour clashes.
Another piece of David Cobley’s is called ‘The Blacksmith’, for this painting it is a portrait of a male but he is just before middle aged and was not the reason of catching my eye, this portrait caught my eye by the way he used the paints and paintbrushes. The thickness of the brushstrokes, the bold colours and the non blended tones within the forehead and cheeks. All of these elements make up this painting more than the image, I feel like I can look past the figure / portrait and focus purely on the process of the painting, see the bold long brush lines and the under layer colour of the dark tones with a thick slab of light toned paint on top just leaving a line in certain areas.
This painting technique is what I tried to experiment with at the start of the year, I found it really hard to keep the portrait and features when using such bold lines and thick paint so I really enjoy looking at his paint work within this painting.
Daisy FineArt 