Dave Pearson, was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 painter and educator who was "a great example of an artist whose life was completely dedicated to serving the imagination". Highly prolific, throughout his life he produced a prodigious quantity of work.

Life

Dave Pearson was born in Clapton, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 in 1937. His father, Sam, was a tailor and his mother Ann went on, in later life, to become a prolific self-taught artist. Pearson was evacuated to Leicester

Leicester

Leicester is a city and unitary authority in the East Midlands of England, and the county town of Leicestershire. The city lies on the River Soar and at the edge of the National Forest...

 at the age of 7, and later attended Parmiter's Grammar School in Bethnal Green

Bethnal Green

Bethnal Green is a district of the East End of London, England and part of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, with the far northern parts falling within the London Borough of Hackney. Located northeast of Charing Cross, it was historically an agrarian hamlet in the ancient parish of Stepney,...

.

He went on to study painting at both St. Martins School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. In 1963 he began teaching at Preston School of Art but soon moved to Manchester

Manchester

Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...

 School of Art where he remained until his retirement in 2002. He lived and kept a studio in Haslingden

Haslingden

Haslingden is a small town in Rossendale, Lancashire, England. It is north of Manchester. The name means 'valley of the hazels', though the town is in fact set on a high and windy hill. In the early 20th century Haslingden had the status of a municipal borough, but following local government...

, Rossendale

Rossendale

Rossendale is a local government district with borough status. It is made up of a number of small former mill towns in Lancashire, England centered around the valley of the River Irwell in the industrial North West...

, as well as at Globe Arts, also in Rossendale. Although he exhibited, notably at the Bluecoat Gallery

Bluecoat Chambers

The Bluecoat is an arts centre in School Lane, Liverpool, Merseyside, England and claims to be the oldest arts centre in Great Britain. It is a Grade I listed building and is meant to be the oldest surviving building in central Liverpool The Bluecoat is an arts centre in School Lane, Liverpool,...

, Liverpool

Liverpool

Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

; the Serpentine Gallery

Serpentine Gallery

The Serpentine Gallery is an art gallery in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, central London. It focuses on modern and contemporary art. The exhibitions, architecture, education and public programmes attract approximately 750,000 visitors a year...

, London; the Ikon Gallery

Ikon Gallery

The Ikon Gallery is an English gallery of contemporary art, located in Brindleyplace, Birmingham. It is housed in the Grade II listed, neo-gothic former Oozells Street Board School, designed by John Henry Chamberlain in 1877. The gallery's current director is Jonathan Watkins.Ikon was set up to...

, Birmingham

Birmingham

Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

; and Chester

Chester

Chester is a city in Cheshire, England. Lying on the River Dee, close to the border with Wales, it is home to 77,040 inhabitants, and is the largest and most populous settlement of the wider unitary authority area of Cheshire West and Chester, which had a population of 328,100 according to the...

 Arts Centre, he worked obsessively, apparently oblivious to the wider art world.

Work

In 1959 Dave Pearson exhibited as part of the Young Contemporaries exhibition in London, and followed this with an exhibition Astronauts at the New Arts Centre.

Shortly after his move to Manchester his work was based on the work of Van Gogh, having been inspired by seeing Lust for Life

Lust for Life

Lust for Life may refer to:* Lust for Life , a 1934 biographical novel about Vincent Van Gogh, written by Irving Stone* Lust for Life , a 1956 film based on the novel, starring Kirk Douglas...

. He filled his house and studio with larger-than-life installations, including The Potato Eaters

The Potato Eaters

The Potato Eaters is a painting by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh which he painted in April 1885 while in Nuenen, Netherlands. It is housed in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam...

 and The (Van Gogh) Bedroom. He then produced a series of nearly 400 drawings and paintings based on the Book of Revelation

Book of Revelation

The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament. The title came into usage from the first word of the book in Koine Greek: apokalupsis, meaning "unveiling" or "revelation"...

. By the 1980s he was working on another large series of drawings, drypoints and paintings based on English Calendar Customs and, later, a series based on the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is an English folk dance involving reindeer antlers and a hobby horse that takes place each year in Abbots Bromley, a small village in Staffordshire, England.-Origins:...

 - In the Seven Woods.

Inspired by the Yeats

Yeats

W. B. Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright.Yeats may also refer to:* Yeats ,* Yeats , an impact crater on Mercury* Yeats , an Irish thoroughbred racehorse-See also:...

 poem Sailing to Byzantium

Sailing to Byzantium

"Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928 collection The Tower. It comprises four stanzas in ottava rima, each made up of eight ten-syllable lines. It uses a journey to Constantinople as a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Yeats explores his thoughts and...

, throughout the 1990’s Dave produced an enormous body of work and staged a series of ambitious one person shows in the north of England with paintings specially created to fit the dimensions of each space. At the Bede Gallery, Jarrow

Jarrow

Jarrow is a town in Tyne and Wear, England, located on the River Tyne, with a population of 27,526. From the middle of the 19th century until 1935, Jarrow was a centre for shipbuilding, and was the starting point of the Jarrow March against unemployment in 1936.-Foundation:The Angles re-occupied...

, where the space was not quite big enough, he covered the floor with mirrors so he could use every inch of the ceiling. Byzantium and Jerusalem Part One, in which he filled the Holden Gallery in Manchester quite literally floor to ceiling, followed in 1997, described as "reminiscent more of an ancient mediterranean orthodox monastery than what one expects to encounter in an art gallery".

As well as literary sources, other themes for his work have included Palmers Yard and the Jarrow March

Jarrow March

The Jarrow March , was an October 1936 protest march against unemployment and extreme poverty suffered in North East England. The 207 marchers travelled from the town of Jarrow to the Palace of Westminster in London, a distance of almost , to lobby Parliament...

, war memorials, mediaeval bestiaries, ancient sites in Orkney and latterly his own illness and mortality. Throughout his life he continued to exhibit in the UK and Europe.

During his life he produced well over 13,000 pieces of work. Adrian Henri

Adrian Henri

Adrian Henri was a British poet and painter best remembered as the founder of poetry-rock group The Liverpool Scene and as one of three poets in the best-selling anthology The Mersey Sound, along with Brian Patten and Roger McGough. The trio of Liverpool poets came to prominence in that city's...

, in Environments and Happenings noted his obsessional quality, and went on to describe Dave (in 1974) as "one of the most exciting new artists around".

The estate was inherited by Dave Pearson's son Christopher, who made over the artwork to a new body, the Dave Pearson Trust, that now owns and manages the work. Recent exhibitions at the See Gallery and other places have kept the work visible.

Teaching

For much of his working life Pearson was a lecturer, and later Senior Lecturer, in the Department of Fine Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University

Manchester Metropolitan University

Manchester Metropolitan University is a university in North West England. Its headquarters and central campus is in the city of Manchester, but there are outlying facilities in the county of Cheshire. It is the third largest university in the United Kingdom in terms of student numbers, behind the...

, 1964-2002. As an artist he was phenomenally productive, anarchic and passionate, and he encouraged and nurtured these qualities in his students throughout his long teaching career. As the painter Stuart Bradshaw commented "Dave the teacher was much less of a teacher than Dave the artist." If Pearson was a great exemplar of what an artist is, he was also no respecter of budgets, bureaucracy or limitations of any kind and was renowned for his ability to use a whole year's worth of course materials in a week-long project.

Posthumous developments

The Dave Pearson Trust has been able to save Pearson's studio in Haslingden, which was left on his death in a dilapidated and semi-ruined condition. The Trust has gone on to start cataloguing the enormous body of work, hold exhibitions both at the restored studio and the See Gallery, and begin to develop a wider interest in the artist. In September 2011 a film, To Byzantium, directed by the film-maker Derek Smith, was released that shows a group of friends rescuing the artist's work and describing the development of his work. In November 2010 the film was shown in the UK on the Community Channel

Community Channel

Community Channel is a British free-to-air television channel wholly owned by Media Trust and supported by major broadcasters including the BBC. Launched in September, 2000, the channel broadcasts from 05:00am – 08:00am each day on Freeview, 24 hours a day on Sky and Virgin TV, and anytime with...

, and submitted to the New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 Film Festivals World's Best Television and film, and the Sheffield

Sheffield

Sheffield is a city and metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. Its name derives from the River Sheaf, which runs through the city. Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and with some of its southern suburbs annexed from Derbyshire, the city has grown from its largely...

 Documentary Festival..

As a result of this, and the involvement of the critic, writer and poet, Edward Lucie-Smith

Edward Lucie-Smith

John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith is a British writer, poet, art critic, curator, broadcaster and author of exhibition catalogues.-Biography:Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United Kingdom in 1946...

, there are advanced plans to hold a large exhibition of Pearson's work in London, in April 2012.

Other sources

• Dave Pearson website - http://www.dspearson.org
• An Artist's Estate; a blog on managing Pearson's artwork - http://anartistsestate.blogspot.com/