David Dipnall

However, when he progressed to Secondary Education with a scholarship to Portsmouth Grammar School, he found to his consternation that a serious study or practice of Art was regarded with disdain. So it was, for nearly a quarter of a century that his artistic leanings lay fallow, whilst David Dipnall succumbed to a career in the manufacturing industry, only to be re-awakened during his time teaching Craft & Design at Geelong Grammar School in Australia. Teaching was already a new direction in his life, so it wasn’t difficult to make one more step and try to become a professional artist. His wife, small son, and David returned to England in 1974, and began painting the English landscape.

Whilst at Geelong, David became familiar with the works of the Heidelberg school, a group of artists working in and around Melbourne around the turn of the century. Their works not only documented the struggle of the early pioneers against difficult conditions in a strange land, but also revealed the astonishing beauty of the ‘Australian Bush’. David Dipnall’s own reaction to these paintings stirred a deep longing to create his own impressions of the landscapes.

Each Artist develops an individual ‘style’ over time, and David Dipnall is no different. For a given medium of expression, (in David’s case, oil paints on stretched canvas), the style develops as the Artist gains confidence to apply the colour without conscious restraint.