David Gommon

Born into a working-class family in London's Battersea, David Gommon first studied art at the local Polytechnic when he was sixteen. Aged nineteen, he was taken up by Lucy Carrington Wertheim - the London-based gallerist renowned for adventurously showing work by Christopher Wood, Frances Hodgkins and gifted naive artists - who gave him his first exhibition. Aided by insights from the artist's own evocative writings, Philip Vann's text intricately examines the development of Gommon's predominantly landscape art infused with mystical delicacy of colour and subtle audacity of composition that often tends towards surrealism rooted latterly in the paradisical surroundings of the Northamptonshire village of Hardingstone where he and his wife Jean lived for several decades.