Cultivating spaces for extraordinary artists
Dale Vn Marshall
Dale's enduring art career began over 25 years ago as a precocious young graffiti artist on the streets of Bath and Bristol in the South West of England. With the freedoms of expression found through rebellion comes also the gritty consequences of street culture, which for Dale, ultimately led to drug use and psychotic episodes. In 1999 he was sectioned in one of Britain's oldest asylums commonly known as the Cornwall County (Lunatic) Asylum. He had clinical depression for another 7 years until he self discharged from anti-psychotic prescription medication.
Within studio and gallery walls, Dale draws his inspiration from his surroundings and his personal experience of battling with mental health. Using text to form the body of his paintings, the works are multi layered, often heavily textured, utilizing a variety of mediums and methods with a strong emphasis on paint process and abstract mark making.
His paintings continue to document his personal journey, his quandary of time travelling one's own past, present and future, and his intuitive abstract mark making as a representation of order and chaos. The text based compositions are painted from a variety of influences, most often from memory: gestural text, memories of the outside California road grid collides with recreated surfaces of his present indoor working environment... a crumbling 1830's structure that formerly served as an institution. Dale chooses to erase words, or paints small hidden meanings in the works in the hope to maintain a balanced and positive future.