Dave Lunt is a Manchester born artist who graduated from from Loughborough University B.A (Hons). Fine Art (Painting) 2000 and MA Art and Design (Studio Practice) 2005
My current practice is centred mainly around painted and drawn formats, alongside photography, digital composition and occasionally collected imagery from magazines, websites etc… The most recent project I have been working on has focussed primarily on mark-making, line and gesture. However these pieces have an intentional ambiguous narrative that hints at (and makes reference to) a number of differing sources and interests that I find ever fascinating. From a young age I have been excited by tales of exploration and old maps, this in turn has become an adult obsession with sea charts, aerial photography,weather forecasts and many aspects of geophysical phenomena (in particular theories relating to the formation of supercontinents) and has grown from a juvenile love of the ‘fantastic’ nature of such subjects, into a study of the abstract qualities of cartography ( ideas relating to scale and distortion) and it’s potential. Making reference to literary work by Borges, Baudrillard, Verne and Eco, amongst others,my artwork is a development of these interests, with the outcome being a number of hyper-real paintings and drawings, simulated again and again using a number of different mediums to produce works with a duality that questions both the idea of the ‘Real’ and the ‘Abstract’. Starting with a series of old macro photographs (taken from a long since destroyed series of gestural abstract expressionist paintings) these images have been digitally manipulated and worked upon to create compositions with a far more infinite potential, each work being a direct response to the last. What are left behind are images that no longer have any origin in the ‘real’ world but instead exist only through the emergence of their own mythology, a journey through an undiscovered seemingly dystopian landscapes.