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Extract from 'Higher Tregethen', private publication 1997

My work has always been concerned with colour; ever since childhood a new box of paints would hold me in awe, and still does. I love the freshness and purity of primary colours. As soon as I mix them together I am overwhelmed by the possibilities they have within a painting. I'm not talking about pattern making here but the way they relate in space on the canvas. I'm not really interested in the tonal qualities in a picture. Colour is the reality I'm looking for. I never use black in my palette; if I do use black it is by itself as part of a drawing or monoprint. I am quite strict with colour mixing and am always drawing colour circles and making references to colour combinations. Often the underlay of a picture will be built up of a series of bright colours, one on top of the other, the last being a dark blue or purple. Only dry I scratch and scrape through the top layers of paint, exposing the various layers beneath. I've always felt that I need some sort of starting point to my work - a reference to some natural phenomenon or social state. It is from here that I start a dialogue, a communication between myself and the canvas. Because of the very isolated nature of the process of painting, the picture tends to veer away from the original motivation and become charged with my personality and life experience.

Like many painters of his generation David Holmes first became exposed to modernist influences during his teens at art college in 1957, and by 1962 its language had fully permeated into the mainstream of his art production. But it was not until 1992 that he discovered St Ives and its art history; immediately falling in love with it and realising he should have been there all the time, his own development having run parallel with it, he finally settled in St Ives in 1998. So it is with St Ives as a context and the group who followed the middle generation painters that we should see his work.

St Ives is where the Russian constructionist project collided with the ocean in 1939, tipping up its horizontal plane of waves to become the conceptual picture plane of modernist painting. Theoretically this came to be understood as a calibrated or rationalised space, leading to variational, compartmental and diagrammatical visual language; eventually formalising itself into the grid or calibrated frame, rationalising the two dimensional picture plane of the canvas. Not as a restriction, but as a safety net, supporting the free improvisation of plastic events over the spatial continuum, sometimes understood as a calendar time-space frame, within which the artist is pacing out his journeys. This synthetic rationalised space, also has the possibility of bending, the net being flexible, creating an ambiguous shallow space when required. The net or grid can also be viewed as an alternating light or dark chequerboard, as a metaphor for the game of art aping the game of life; space-time-consciousness. At times the elements of modernist painting appear to expand out beyond the apparent restrictions of its actual physical parameters; at its best it becomes free of the structures upon which its system is founded, then it just transcends those limitations.

I am not suggesting in writing the above that all modernist painters have necessarily understood all the implications of this theory, because often solutions to painting practise are arrived at unconsciously, using intuition and sheer primal creative drive, but all have taken part in the project with the very best, all have been in the same business of creating the ideal modernised fetishised cultural art object; the potential of which is encoded in the brain and intelligence of man.

It is in St Ives, so dominated by its space and light, that the ideas of modernist abstract painting practice could take root within the primary experience of the land/seascape relationship: the place becoming the beacon of post-war abstraction.

It is within this context that David Holmes continues to play his creative chess game in each work, pitted against himself, his experience, sensibilities and preferences. There are of course many received notions as to what abstract art is about, and as a 20th century phenomenon it has taken many diverse forms; therefore there is much confusion about it's possible meanings. David Holmes has a commitment to the medium of oil paint, whether on canvas, board or paper; like so many painters, it his his first love, the sheer pleasure of its handling being ideal for communicating feeling and psychological impulse. He uses glazing techniques to modify colours or areas, often he mutes stronger colour with lighter colour, which allows the under painting to show through: this places them into secondary importance, the strategy helping to simplify the compositional reading of the work. Because of the long drying time of the oil medium, the works are constructed in series; this approach allows him to feed ideas between paintings, influence working around the series, the whole being informed by events which occur during the direct painting process. He is also a compulsive mono-printmaker, relishing the technique's spontaneity and chance effects; added to this is the continuous inspiration of the early masters of modernism.

Although I have earlier alluded to the theory and strategies of abstract painting that have influenced art from cubism to minimalism, David Holmes makes his own game with the manipulation of spatial events within the painting's internal organisation: creating harmony between gestural movements, free forms, line and colour, with tonal contrasts; using spatial tensions at the edges of the canvas, creating strong images, all in a free improvisational style.

John Charles Clark 2002

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