David Walsh

DAVID WALSH (India 1927 - England, 1981).
"Landscape," 1959.
Mixed media on paper.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 17 x 25 cm; 38 x 45 x 2 cm (frame).

English painter. Between 1949 and 1953 he studied at the Anglo-French Art Centre and the Royal College of Art in London. He became known as an illustrator of children's stories and in the satirical magazine Punch. He lived in Ibiza from 1954. From there he illustrated books and continued to work as an illustrator. His first paintings had a very oriental flavor. He signed them with the pseudonym "Gopal". After a short period experimenting with abstraction, he gradually developed his own personal expression of reality. Serene, poetic, sensual, often with a mystical surrealist touch. These early works were tempera paintings on linen, but from 1963 he worked with oil, mainly on board or wood. His inspiration was Ibiza -his adopted homeland-, sometimes the lush English parks, but the unexpected figures and objects, or their dimensions, turned these parks, landscapes, roads and beaches into poetry. Throughout his life he was drawing caricatures and sketches with great wit and sense of humor, sometimes finishing them in pastel or oil. He left Ibiza in 1979. He exhibited in Ibiza at the Ivan Spence Gallery and Elliot Gallery, the latter in Sant Carles de Peralta, and also in galleries in London, Toronto, Chicago, Madrid and Barcelona. In 2007 the Club Diario de Ibiza presented a retrospective exhibition of his work.