David Grossmann: Gifts

David Grossmann

Jonathan Cooper 20 Park Walk London SW10 0AQ t: +44 (0)20 7351 0410 mail@jonathancooper.co.uk jonathancooper.co.uk Exhibition

June – 20 July 2024 David Grossmann GIFTS

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GIFTS

When I began working on these paintings two years ago, I felt an undercurrent of panic. Would I have enough time to finish? Enough energy? My son had just been born and the joyful upheaval of becoming a parent left me staggering to find a new balance.

As a parent, time seems to speed by much faster than it did before. The days are a blur of trying to keep up with the energy and imagination of a toddler. The nights are often interrupted by his crying, and as I hold my son and settle him back to sleep I marvel at how fast he is growing.

Life gradually settles into new rhythms, and I feel a deeper sense of gratitude taking shape in the wake of my receding panic. Along the way my son turns two and I turn forty. My paintings begin to reflect this season of compressed time and of broadening gratitude, more than ever

blurring the lines between the world and my inner landscape of thought and emotion.

And so when flowers bloom in my garden they also emerge as symbols of impermanence and hope, of my vulnerability and of the fragility of a world at war. Migrations of birds become meditations on my own journeys in and out of the unknown. Lights from our neighbour’s windows bring to mind the isolation and connection of our day-to-day experience. The cat and birds that frequent my yard remind me of the commonplace dramas, often of survival, that run parallel with my daily routines. Patterns on the surface of water turn into musings on aging and memory. All of this circle back in their ways to themes of time and of gratitude, to the reminders that what I am given day by day is, after all, enough.

David Grossmann

Evening Frost, 2024 (detail) illustrated fully on plate 2