Tycho’s preoccupation over the past few years has been urbanisation and the urban experience, creating works that consider the uneasy coexistence of opulence, beauty, poverty, decay and marginalisation found in most urban centres.
David’s creative process involves absorbing and synthesising these urban phenomena into personal descriptions, reactions and interpretations, drawing upon his own formal preoccupations with line, shape, colour, gesture and texture. Although the built environment is used as a starting point, the works evolve and transform in an intuitive fashion to the point where representational elements are distilled, intensified and occasionally usurped by subconscious narratives and aesthetic impulses.
The artworks are not so much about a specific city or neighbourhood, but act, rather, as more of an essence or archetype that expresses the idea of urban-ness. They are visual and psychological metaphors for all that a city thrusts at us, encapsulating the yin and yang of contemporary urban existence.
David Tycho is a master painter in with studios in Canada Painters TUBES
has been delighted to work with David for a number of years. He has written a number of essays about Art for painters TUBEs magazine and here is an extracted version which was written
by him in 2016 which is about Urban paintings in the USA.
“...Most artists need something to react against, and the city, with its systemic inequities and seemingly indifferent power structure, has in modern times provided a worthy adversary. In America, depictions of the city until the late 1800s were generally favourable, often echoing their European counterparts.
Street scenes and even factories spewing out toxic effluent and smoke were painted with a bright, airy, positive sensibility, as if these satanic mills were an innocuous backdrop for the modern urban landscape.
The privileged and sanitised world of the upper class was also a frequent source of imagery and income for commissioned artists. It was all very genteel, and so far removed from the reality faced by the vast majority of the citizenry, some of whom of course were those insolent artists.
continued...
One of the first movements that chose to ignore the refined traditions of American Impressionism and academic realism was the “Ashcan School”, derisively christened as such due to the frequency of ashcans (bins used to discard ashes from coal and wood burning stoves) rendered in their paintings.
As socialist sympathisers, they sought to paint the plight of the working class in urban America, and their preferred settings were the overcrowde
