Artists Inspired by London: Daniel Preece

Painting an evolving London

Daniel Preece is a London-based artist who paints panoramas of London to single shopfronts. He says, ‘My intention is to encourage the viewer to consider the city differently, and I hope, lead them to reassess their daily surroundings with a different eye.’ We first came across his work via the gallery Kittoe Contemporary and asked him about his practice and favourite parts of the city.

The artist working en plein air. Image copyright the artist.

How did you come to paint cities, including London? What draws you to them?

I first became interested in painting from observation and the landscape at 17. A kindly art teacher at my school put me on a course to paint the Sussex landscape. He taught at Camberwell College and was interested in colour and the work of Pierre Bonnard. He taught the students about oil painting and encouraged us to paint in situ. This turned me onto colour, painting in the landscape and working directly from observation. While at art school, I had the opportunity to paint in North Wales and became interested in recording the slate mines and mountains in Snowdonia. With the ever-changing light and weather conditions, I tried to record light through colour.

While at the Slade School of Art, I lived in South London and on my daily bike journey to UCL (Slade is a part of UCL), I became fascinated by the gasometers and the tower blocks that populated the area where I grew up. At various times of the day, their different light and colour affected their scale and context, and I saw them as urban mountains. My teachers encouraged me to paint this experience, and I have spent twenty years or more recording these gasometers as they slowly disappeared from the London skyline.

I like the idea that cities are not static places (although I paint them in a static way). They reflect the demographics and societies that exist in them. I am interested in the formal elements of drawing and painting, and the city allows me to explore this, developing complex ‘abstract’ paintings and drawings that play with colour, space, pattern and shape. I also like the idea that I can project these thoughts and ideas into these thoughts that, although not illustrated, allow me to reflect on the experience, creating personal narratives.

Below the paywall:

• What draws him to particular landmarks and places

• His favourite parts of London

• More works by Daniel