The first comprehensive overview of this highly prolific, yet relatively unknown, twentieth-century Bristish painter. Born into a working-class family in London's Battersea, David Gommon first studied art at the local Polytechnic when he was sixteen. Aged nineteen, he was taken up by Lucy Carrington Wertheim - the London-based gallerist renowned for adventurously showing work by Christopher Wood, Frances Hodgkins and gifted naive artists - who gave him his first exhibition. Aided by insights from the artist's own evocative writings, Philip Vann's text intricately examines the development of Gommon's predominantly landscape art ? infused with mystical delicacy of colour and subtle audacity of composition that often tends towards surrealism ? rooted latterly in the paradisical surroundings of the Northamptonshire village of Hardingstone where he and his wife Jean lived for several decades. AUTHORS: Philip Vann is a writer on the visual arts and a freelance exhibition curator. He is the author of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century (Sansom & Co, 2004) and texts for numerous books and catalogues on British, Irish and international painters and sculptors. Since being Assistant Exhibition Organiser of the British Council-funded show 'New Frontiers of Naïve Art in Europe' (Royal Festival Hall, London, 1984), he has written a good deal about naïve, Outsider, self-taught and children's art from Britain and around the world, as well as central and eastern European folk art. He has long been fascinated by the ways leading Modernist artists often find themselves enriched and inspired by art beyond the mainstream ? for example, work by great self-taught painters such as Henri Rousseau, Louis Vivin, Alfred Wallis and Madge Gill. Karen Taylor is the Collections and Exhibitions Curator at Towner Eastbourne, a public art gallery in East Sussex, England. In 2022, she researched and curated an exhibition about visionary 1930s art collector, patron and gallerist Lucy Wertheim ? the champion of David Gommon who gave him his first solo show and became a lifelong friend.
