Dave Pearson

David Samuel Pearson (4 August 1937 – 19 July 2008), commonly known as "Dave Pearson", was an English painter and educator who was "a great example of an artist whose life was completely dedicated to serving the imagination". Highly prolific, throughout his life he produced a prodigious quantity of work.

Life Dave Pearson was born in Clapton, London in 1937. His father, Sam, was a tailor and his mother Ann went on, in later life, to become a prolific self-taught artist. Pearson was evacuated to Leicester at the age of 7, and later attended Parmiter's Grammar School in Bethnal Green.

As well as literary sources, other themes for his work have included Palmers Yard and the Jarrow March, war memorials, mediaeval bestiaries, ancient sites in Orkney and latterly his own illness and mortality. Throughout his life he continued to exhibit in the UK and Europe.

During his life he produced well over 13,000 pieces of work. Adrian Henri, in Environments and Happenings noted his obsessional quality, and went on to describe Dave (in 1974) as "one of the most exciting new artists around".

The estate was inherited by Dave Pearson's son Christopher, who made over the artwork to a trust, the Dave Pearson Trust. The estate was returned to Christopher Pearson in 2018.

Teaching

For much of his working life Pearson was a lecturer, and later Senior Lecturer, in the Department of Fine Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, 1964–2002. As an artist he was unusually productive and passionate, and he encouraged and nurtured these qualities in his students throughout his long teaching career. As the painter Stuart Bradshaw commented "Dave the teacher was much less of a teacher than Dave the artist." If Pearson was a great exemplar of what an artist is, he was also no respecter of budgets, bureaucracy or limitations of any kind and was renowned for his ability to use a whole year's worth of course materials in a week-long project. and submitted to the New York City Film Festivals World's Best Television and film, and the Sheffield Documentary Festival.

As a result of this, and the involvement of the critic, writer and poet, Edward Lucie-Smith, there was a large exhibition of Pearson's work at the Bermondsey Project gallery in London, in April/May 2012. Several other exhibitions have followed from this, and another large-scale exhibition at the Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, in Summer 2018 that showed work originally hung in the same space in 1994.

In 2009 the Trust completed its cataloguing of the artist's work and started operating as The Dave Pearson Studio.

Public Collections Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool (3 works) Royal Blackburn Hospital The Museum of English Rural Life (6 works) The Whitaker, Rawtenstall