David Mankin’s work is about landscape. His canvases rove over sightlines and perspectives, creating an experience of place rather than a specific view. His paintings transcribe the pulse of the natural world; the movement of seasons, time, tides and weather, conjuring a sense of our human insignificance in the face of the elements.
This body of work is named Uncharted. For Mankin, the blank canvas is his voyage into the unknown, each painting a journey with no fixed destination. An explorer in paint, he searches for new connections, embracing risk and pushing boundaries to better communicate his experience.
In November last year, Mankin was invited to the Pouch Cove art residency in Newfoundland, Canada, a remote fishing cove close to the most eastern point of North America. This month-long residency acted as a catalyst, inspiring and shaping this body of work. There is a long history between Cornwall and Newfoundland, the two coasts paired and mirrored in their ancestry, fishing industry, art communities and relationship with the ocean. The two are physically linked by Marconi’s 1901 morse-code transmitter, stretching from Poldhu in the South West of Cornwall to Signal Hill, St. John’s, Newfoundland. There are artistic connections too: the Cornish painter Alfred Wallis travelled to Newfoundland to fish cod, his later paintings referencing these treacherous Canadian waters.
Mankin undertook a journey into the unfamiliar with this residency, both finding connections and forging his own path. The root of this collection of work is Mankin’s experience and appreciation of the unforgiving landscape of Newfoundland: the untamed seas, dense pine forests, cathedral-like cliffs and the drama of the weather.
Uncharted is David Mankin’s first solo exhibition with &Gallery. He exhibits his work in galleries throughout the UK and his paintings are held in numerous private and public collections. A book about his paintings and process David Mankin – Remembering in Paint was published in 2021.
Kate Reeve-Edwards, art writer
