David Inshaw will celebrate his 70th birthday on 21 March, around the time of the spring equinox. On the eve of this grand climacteric, which will be marked by an exhibition of new and old work at the Fine Art Society, I went down to Devizes to interview him. He has lived for much of his life there, with brief interludes in Bristol, London, Cambridge and Wales. In Devizes he is surrounded by the countryside that has most inspired him — the Marlborough Downs and the open stretches of Salisbury Plain, the trees and hills of his beloved Wiltshire.
Inshaw is a landscape and figure painter, known to many as a Ruralist (a group he co-founded in 1975 with his great friend Sir Peter Blake, and which he left in 1983). He is perhaps the greatest living proponent of the English Romantic tradition, a painter of nudes and lyrical landscapes very much in the tradition of William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash. His brand of heightened symbolic realism is intensely beguiling.
Inshaw’s studio is a converted Quaker Meeting House built in 1703, timber-framed with a brick infill, converted for him by the artists’ architect M.J. Long. ‘I bought it on my 60th birthday so I’ve been here ten years. I had a lot of work done — it’s good for another 300 years now.’ His home consists of one large room with a mezzanine library, a large bedroom upstairs, a tiny guest room and bathroom. He really lives in the big airy studio, where he works, cooks and eats. It’s impeccably tidy, otherwise, he admits, ‘I don’t know where things are’. At the moment it’s full of paintings, mostly his own, and we spend a couple of very enjoyable hours looking through them.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in