David Rae b. 1995
The locations forming the basis for my work are mainly those that featured in my childhood, places visited or those that are re-imagined. Capturing a sense of place is an important aspect to each piece; alluding to an atmosphere in which I explore the presence of absence. The depicted scenes can be a fusion of multiple places, creating somewhere believable but ultimately never an exact setting, populated by objects that suggest human interaction and originate from my wider interests, sport being a prime example.
Born in 1995 and raised in South-West Scotland, David Rae Studied Painting at Grays School of Art in Aberdeen between 2013 and 2017. Following his degree show he was selected to show in the 2018 RSA New Contemporaries where he won both the Walter Scott and the David and June Gordon memorial trust awards.
Rae is part of a growing interest in the possibility of unspoken narratives through the use of realism and subtraction. Rae’s paintings offer a remarkable sense of space through the realistic rendition of textures and perspective and behind this curtain of reality the figureless, empty spaces suggest an uneasy absence. The resulting imagery has connotations of an unfinished story or a hidden truth, a simple device to incite curiosity. Rae’s work suggestively imitates the beauty of human and natural environments while maintaining a perspicuous stillness which is both disquieting and analytical.
