Extracts from Reviews
[David Tress] went to Trent [Polytechnic] because Victor Burgin was a tutor there, and experimented with all the fashionable enthusiasms, but became disenchanted. 'Basically, I realised eventually that I wanted to paint. There has got to be an honesty in what you do that makes all theory irrelevant'.
Robert Macdonald, Modern Painters, Summer 1997
Tress is an emotional painter, depicting states of mind as much as specific places, recalled not necessarily in tranquillity. His drawings are often seared and scraped, the thick paper scored through and patched over and reworked, looking as though violence has been visited upon them in the artist's determination to express his understanding of their significance and meaning.
Andrew Lambirth, The Spectator, 22 January 2005
If the landscape-painter label summons up expectations of something dainty, precise and traditional, then a rude awakening is in order. Tress is above all a modern painter, post-Abstract Expressionism and ready to use all sorts of techniques like applying torn and crumbling canvas or paper to the surface of his paintings and then painting over them.
John Russell Taylor, The Times, 2 February 2005
Books and Catalogues
Rapid communication systems have changed our lives, but not, I think our need of nature. The experience of it continues to inspire artists as diverse as Bridget Riley, David Hockney and Richard Long. And if there are aspects of today's culture ('Thrillingly heartless,' says Martin Amis of the writer Will Self) that seem deliberately to promote an absence of meaning, landscape art continues to have a tremendous resonance, perhaps because it comes freighted with tradition yet is also capable of touching our concerns for the earth’s future. To draw or paint the land is today one of the most radical things an artist can do.
Exhibition catalogue 'David Tress', introduction by Frances Spalding, West Wales Arts Centre, 1997
while earlier writers on his work… have, quite correctly, cited his youthful interests in Abstract Expressionism and Performance Art as holding the key to the boldness and freedom of attitude of this painting there is, still, something initially more puzzling and more mysterious about his artistic make up, that this suggestion does not quite answer. It starts from the man, and the artist himself, and the sense of physical and emotional solitariness with which he seems, almost deliberately, to surround himself…. This suggests a deeply felt need to keep quietly concentrated and focussed on what he is doing that the distractions of bigger artistic centres would tend to dissipate.
Exhibition catalogue 'David Tress', introduction by Nicholas Usherwood, West Wales Arts Centre, 2000.
an emotional response is an inseparable part of the decisions and perceptions that go into the making of any painting. Tress has always been interested in countryside lore, as well as celebrations like harvest festivals and bringing trees inside at Christmas. They all relate to the earth and the seasons, and much of the imagery straddles both the pagan and Christian world. Although he follows no religion, he is attracted by the atmosphere of humbler rural churches, especially those with Romanesque carvings.
Monograph 'David Tress' by Clare Rendell with an introduction by John Russell Taylor, Gomer Press, 2002.
Tress portrays the face of nature, its timelessness and apparent immutability. He has a profound awareness of the past, and this is evident in the treatment of his subject. The work is moody visceral but also thoughtful. Tress is drawn to a sense of threshold: those places where the fields meet the crags or the moors, or where the land meets the sea. Situations of most drama. He captures the energy of the seasons and the suddenness of their arrival and change. Sometimes he allows visible a horizon line, at others he goes deep into detail; sometimes both. A dark tangle of foliage, mysterious with lights and shadows, is endlessly suggestive in its references.
Exhibition catalogue 'David Tress Lluniadau Drawings', introduction by Andrew Lambirth, West Wales Arts Centre, 2003.