David Storey

Originating from West Cumbria, David Storey studied art and design at Hornsey College of Art in London. He went on to work as a record sleeve artist and was responsible for a number of iconic covers. For the past twenty years David has focused exclusively on painting. In that time his work has been widely exhibited and collected, both throughout the UK and abroad.

His psychologically charged paintings focus on people and places – half recalled memories at the point of fading away. Figures emerge from complex layers of texture and colour – fragments of a narrative that the viewer is invited to complete.

“Threadneedle Prize finalist David Storey’s haunting paintings are, above all, an exploration of memory – memory in all its fleeting complexity.

Working from his studio in an old Victorian dairy in Brighton, East Sussex, David draws deeply on the images and atmospheres of his own childhood and teenage years spent growing up in West Cumbria.

The alluring figures that populate the paintings belong to no particular time and place. he draws his ideas from a range of sources, most frequently from old photographs – the sort that often turn up in car boot sales or bric-a-brac shops, where whole family histories might be found parcelled into a cardboard box or a tattered envelope. These memories are rescued and then re-imagined at that point where they might vanish forever.”
Simon Beavis