David Forster RSW: The things which they enjoy in life

About

David Forster RSW is renowned for his intricate skill in the use of watercolour and acrylic as mediums to create an intense atmosphere, manipulating light and accentuating architecture to reinvent a romantic narrative.

Forster was long-been fascinated by the way in which nature creeps back into the city, and how we model parks and planted spaces to evoke an idealised sense of our relationship with nature, and the stories we tell about it. As Forster’s work has moved out into the country, this balance has reversed, with the man-made often now only a tiny element dwarfed by the wild.

This exhibition of recent works focusses on the theme of remembered European holidays, with a slanted take on the idea of leisure, pleasure and the picturesque.

'Visions of utopia, visions of modernity, visions of leisure, visions of the picturesque and visions of the broken. Looking back on my life and travel in Europe over fifty years, revisiting old photographs and past paintings, this exhibition has been an attempt to reclaim through memory my own experience of being there. It is an evocation of what is past, and which maybe beyond repair, but also of what lingers there, somehow to be hoped for... For this series I have abandoned my usual source of titles, and scoured the arid reaches of that European declaration, The Treaty of Rome.'

David Forster is an Edinburgh based artist whose work has received great acclaim and has been exhibited widely across the country. Since being awarded various prizes from the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour and winning first prize in The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition in 2013 he has become known as one of the most accomplished artists in his medium.