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David Harding

68 - 69- Cardiff College of Art - Foundation Studies.
69 - 72 - Cardiff College of Art - Dip.AD, Fine Art.
72 - 73 - University of London, Institute of Education - ATC - (Art Teachers Certificate)
                (Extra courses - Film - Ceramics - Theatre in Education)
2005 - City & Guilds Level 2 - Information Technology (Distinction)

 Drawing - for me:  is a strange escapade - it has always been strange.
As a child, my first teachers were  books and British and American comics - including a huge Gustave Dore Compendium that my Father acquired from somewhere (which I still have) and everything on Art in the Ebbw Vale library that I could consume - I copied everything, from Durer to Klimpt.
Somehow - (and it still mystefies me) even in junior school I was engaged beyond my years and fully involved - and was often out drawing directly around the moorland of Ebbw Vale - it was all centered on a half understood thirst to learn. Later,  in secondary school - I thankfully had a terrific teacher (David Coles) who introduced me to the Bauhaus and the use of all kinds of materials and media. I continued to learn how to render things in various ways,  to train the hand and eye in observational drawing from all kinds of objects - the innards of clocks - animal skulls - stone walls - my own hands - learning how to make some kind of equivalent dynamic marks.

Later at Art College - it all continued, but at a number of different levels. Responding to the wild and wonderful chaos we see everyday in Nature and the cyclic events of the green world - the animal world - the world of stones, earth and water - and the wildest world of all - the world of people.
Going back again - looking again: - at all the old masters, and the wonders of Van Gogh's drawings, re-looking at Picasso, et all, and most significantly coming back to cave paintings and aboriginal peoples art/map making, like I was coming home in some way - and bringing them to the table of my readings about the Fractal world, Quantum physics - and as always, Music.

The continuing problem is how to - inhabit all of that world, how to own it - how to respond in line, edges, shadow and mass - so that my equivalent marks speak only for me and not just become artifacts in some abstract and recieved notion of 'Drawing' or of 'Art'. This continues to be an ongoing important, if fuzzy idea - ie. I am not interested in 'ART' per se. I try and put marks together in an order that I want to - regardless of space and time - they should, on a good day, owe nothing to any other sensibility or pragmatism. I understand my hard won skills, but I am not satisfied with the familiarity of materials and the rehearsed thing. I am not looking for an accepted dialogue of marks - to particularly make anything look like anything. I do not want to be held in the sway of my own skills or any other histories sway - though there are places of compromise, there has to be, or nothing would get done.
I do not want to be enthralled by the tricks of my experienced and trained hand... I've done all that in the past and also through my time in Theatre Design and professional illustration...as ever, I'm trying something else - and it'll have to be whatever it is - good bad or indifferent.

( A quote from Po Chu i - last two lines of the poem 'Pruning Trees' )
' Of Things - There are non that do not bide both good and ill,
Of Men - There are none that do not have at least some preferences.'

 
Other Links to David's work:
 http://www.daiharding.com/           http://www.myspace.com/49machines