David Mead

Aged four Mead moved from London to Whitstable in Kent, where he lived next to the landscape painter Daniel Sherrin. He encouraged a young Mead to paint and taught him to a level so proficient that he was able to sell his watercolours when still only twelve years old. Despite continuing to paint he did not do so professionally until much later, after war service with the Air Ministry. By 1944 he had a picture accepted by the Royal Academy and two years later was made a Fellow of the Central Institute of Art & Design-National Gallery. The present has a peaceful stillness and quiet surreality, in a similar vein to that found in the works of Tristram Hillier and Algernon Newton.