By Eric Hiller
Artist’s studios are fascinating places to visit and David Hawley’s shed in the back corner of his property in Burnie never fails to live up to expectations.
From his earliest large abstract expressionist works which included some big circular highly textured paintings, David has come a long way. He is currently exploring pattern, texture and shape with a surprising delicacy given his stature and personality.
He has been working on what he calls his ‘fat’ paintings, three dimensional rectangular works garnished with raised lines on a rough textured Hessian base that intrude from the wall and into the room. Tacked to the walls of his studio are collections of smallish rectangular and rhomboidal coloured patterns, ideas for larger and more substantial works taken from his extensive sketchbooks.
His drawings are rougher and more gestural than his finished works – qualities David once achieved in his paintings but now despises. The finished works are graceful repetitive motifs worked over an underlying grid pattern. The images are not substantial, more like echoes, the colours muffled and the relationship between the forms, subtle and often surprising in their visual impact.
David Hawley has been working on a new system of painting. He is interested in developing an interchangeable system capable of giving infinite variations of certain decorative motifs.
It involves discarding from his repertoire all that is intuitive and replacing it with a more scientific and empirical way of working, no longer relying on chance. David works incessantly almost achieving a trance like state.
There are similarities in David’s methods and approach with those used by a European group of writers and artists who began in the 1960s. They re-introduce into their work the notion of restraint, rather than emphasizing spontaneity and randomness. The group is known as OuLiPo. They have a preference to work within rules and structures which not only stimulate but open up rich veins of creativity. Such a method produces an art form not limited to its appearance, which contains secret riches and which demands from the viewer or reader an effort of exploration.
David has developed his theories quite independently of this group. David believes that the use of spontaneity as a liberating agent, of the unconscious and subconscious is a myth. In fact the inspiration which involves blindly obeying any impulse is in reality a form of slavery that constraints help to liberate.
Eric Hiller
2001