About
My Art
Art is a passion. Ever since my school days, when I produced large murals, painted stage sets and experimented with oversize landscapes, it is something which I have enjoyed as therapy and relaxation. I have no formal training and I am largely self-taught. I have picked up lots of useful tips from art courses at Marlborough College Summer School and now that I am retired I have much more opportunity to paint and draw. I am lucky to have two art studios, one in Marlborough High Street in the UK and another at our property in Spain at The San Roque Club. Landscapes, whether buildings, mountains, woodlands, harbours or seascapes or a mixture of these are my most regular subject. I work mostly in oils, but enjoy watercolours, acrylics, pastels and mixed media formats as well.
Please see separate sections on this website for Oils, Watercolours, Pastels and Drawings
as well as some examples of my commission work. I will add a section on Acrylics in due course. Another feature is my monthly blog. The December 2019 instalment provides a step by step description of my oil painting ‘18th hole, San Roque Old Course, in evening light, 2019’, painted on a canvas block 73cm wide by 60cm high, with 6 illustrations of the different stages in completing this piece. Size of artwork illustrated on my website always gives width followed by height in centimetres.
Writing
When I retired, I embarked on an ambitious project to write a historical trilogy about the British and French in India, exploring the struggle for independence from the viewpoint of the principal Indian protagonists, fictional characters in a drama that spans the period from 1857 to 1968.
I have just completed a first draft for the initial book, the story of Sridhar Singh and his son Herak. A desire to make a difference, tough choices and questions of responsibility dominate this historical novel. Sridhar Singh, aged just nineteen, is forced to abandon his studies at Delhi College and finds himself plunged into the horrors of the 1857 rebellion against the British in India. Fifty-five years later, a father and grandfather, we find that he is an accomplished journalist and an expert on the Indian Railway system. To the Yamuna Bridge
is a heart wrenching epic. Caught up in the struggle for Indian independence, Sridhar and his family are fully exposed to the clash of cultures, conflicted loyalties and political intrigue of this period.
The second book is still in its infancy. Set largely in Pondicherry and Lucknow it charts the path of the Indian characters from the turbulent 1920s and 1930s through to independence and the partition of India. Herak’s son, Mukunda Singh, becomes a police officer in Pondicherry, having married the young French girl he met on a farm during the First World War, when he was serving with the 6th Jats on the Western Front. Annabelle qualifies as a nurse. They enjoy the lifestyle of the southern Indian city which retains many features of its French colonial past. Mukunda’s relationship with his father is fraught with difficulty as Herak continues to be at the centre of the fight for independence. His militant ideology, subversive activities and civil disobedience cause tensions and anxiety for both friends and family.
The third book is the story of two postgraduate students at Oxford in the 1960s struggling to re-evaluate and reinterpret colonial history as disciples of Jack Gallagher, the Beit Professor of Commonwealth History. Whilst pursuing their own theses they have to contend with challenging debates about the cold war in Africa, the Indo-Pakistani conflict, the destabilisation of the Middle East and emerging troubles in Northern Ireland. It is a decade of revolution, but for the two protagonists it marks new beginnings with fresh challenges and dilemmas. Anita Singh is the great granddaughter of Sridhar Singh. She is working on a new assessment of the French East India Company in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India. She befriends Mark Hopkins, slightly older, a tall, confident research assistant working for Professor Gallagher. Mark’s own work on East India Merchants in Calcutta is frequently interrupted by demanding assignments from his boss which take him off in new directions. He asks Anita to marry him, but she has uncovered some dark secrets about his family’s colonial past.
FAQ's
If you have any questions on this or other matters please email me at
davidtconsultancyservices@gmail.com or contact me on
+44 7872 988010
Thank you for your understanding.
Contact Information UK and Spain
Email Me
For general inquiries & questions,
contact me via email
Purchasing Information & Useful Links
Pricing
Prices on the English language site are given in Pounds Sterling.
For anyone placing orders in Spain I am happy to convert these prices to a Euro equivalent. At the current time I am happy to simply replace the £ symbol with Euros and not worry about the vagaries of the exchange rate. Euro prices are given on the Spanish language version of the site. For my own sanity these are currently pegged at 1:1 ratio. Any item which does not have a price is not for sale.
Prices do not include VAT or IVA (the Spanish sales tax).
Delivery and Shipping
I am wonderfully lucky to have two art studios, one in Marlborough High Street in Wiltshire, England, and one at the San Roque Club in Spain, near Sotogrande. This does however pose a few issues for delivery of any artwork purchased. Many items are at my studio in Marlborough, but going forward I am going to spend much more time in Spain. The physical location of any particular piece will impact delivery time as will my own location at any particular time. I will have to ask for the forbearance of any prospective purchasers on this matter. It is best if delivery and/or shipping are discussed on a case by case basis.
If you have any questions on this or other matters please email me at davidtconsultancyservices@gmail.com
or contact me on +44 7872 988010
Thank you for your understanding.
Here are a few sites which I find useful or interesting:
