The individual painting style of David Utting, strong line and colour working together with delicate detail, has developed without formal training.
His early interests, the snow scenes of Breugel, the vigour of Van Gogh and Picasso, and later the work of the northern painters Geoffrey Key and Peter Brook, reflect this tension and continue to influence his work.
His love of painting was a constant in his early years in Nottingham, and throughout his working life - at a rose nursery, with a joiner, a builder, in a electronics factory, and finally in the police.
After 25 years as a constable he moved to Cornwall to paint full time, where light and colour, boats and harbours, working fishermen, and families on holiday became his subject for several successful years.
Then, finding the southern climate left him restless, and missing the changing seasons, frosts and snow of his northern roots, he moved to North Yorkshire, already familiar through visits from Nottingham to Whitby.
Here he has begun to understand his inspiration.
This colourful landscape provides both of the contrasting elements of his work; the strong shapes and colours in red roofs, bright painted boats, steep hills and roads; and fine detail in the pattern of windows and doors, rigging and lifting gear, bleached moorland grasses and grazing cows.
It has also revealed the underlying source of his inspiration – the shaping of the landscape by the work of the men and women who have made a living and a home here. Cultivated fields, hedges and barns, the tumble of houses to the water’s edge, fishing and holiday boat trips, tracks in the snow to an outlying farm, these are the foundations of his work, the subjects that recur throughout his paintings, recording life and work with humour and dignity.
