Through light and colour, David Dawson
explores the structure of nature

David Dawson was born in Hamilton, Ontario and raised in Ancaster and Galt. He is an honours graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design. He  began painting with oils at the age of ten and remembers, “my earliest inspiration in drawing came from my dad when my twin brother and I would sit on either side of him on his big arm chair and watch him sketch bucking horses and cowboys. He also received encouragement from his grade six teacher whom upon retiring, gave him some of her oil painting books and from his dad's Aunt Theresa who would set him and his brother up with oil paints and canvases in her sun room surrounded by her magnolia gardens and gold fish ponds in Brantford, Ontario.

David Dawson has spent much of his career painting places he’s never seen. Now he’s focusing on places as only he sees them.

One part of Dawson’s portfolio draws an exotic path through the architectural world: soaring glass towers in Jakarta, Amman and Beijing, massive sports stadiums such as the Skydome (now the Rogers Center) and the Saddledome, offices and hotels and resorts the world over. And Dawson has been to hardly any of them. "I don’t get to go to those places, the architects do,” Dawson said with a smile.

Dawson is an architectural renderer, a specialized artist who creates the illustrations that let architects show their clients what a finished building will look like.

But enter his second floor studio at Gravenhurst’s Muskoka Wharf, and it’s the other side of Dawson’s portfolio that leaps out. There are some renderings in the room - a work-in-progress on a drafting table, and a couple of pieces tucked up against the wall - but it’s obvious that this space is devoted to expressionist painting rather than architectural fidelity. The walls are lined with Dawson’s large, vibrant canvases, gleaming swaths of colour that show the parts of the world that interest him most.

In some cases, the physical location of the landscape is obvious - a mountainous scene speaks of the Rockies, while another shows an island-dotted, big skied landscape that could only be Georgian Bay. But most of the paintings have a geographic anonymity and many blur the lines between landscape and abstract. A glacier is rendered as a study in cool greens and icy blues; a scene of the Alberta foothills features a prominent band of autumn-poplar yellow but nothing that is identifiable as a tree. While he can identify the locations of all his landscapes if you ask him, Dawson doesn’t view these as paintings of a place; rather, they are paintings that are simply inspired by a place. "I use the landscape more as the subject matter for these studies of colour and shape", he said.

His work begins with simple sketches, three or four inch wide scenes he does quickly in a sketch book. “I do my on-site studies with pencil crayons because it allows me to focus on the immediate aspects that interest me, not the details."

But even in his more representational paintings it is the colour, line and shape that are the significant elements; thinking about one of his paintings afterwards, viewers are likely to recall the glow of luminous yellow set against a sinuous dark line rather than remembering it as a painting of an autumn tree.

Andrew Wagner-Chazalon
Beyond the City (with permission)