David Tindle RA

David Tindle RA (b. 1932, Huddersfield) is a British painter known particularly for his finely worked egg tempera paintings of interiors, still lifes and landscapes. Open doors and windows, empty chairs and carefully placed objects recur throughout his work, creating images in which ordinary domestic spaces are charged with a strong sense of memory, absence and the passage of time.

Tindle studied at Coventry School of Art and held his first solo exhibition at the Piccadilly Gallery, London, in 1954. In the same year he exhibited at the Royal Academy. His early work attracted the attention of John Minton, who bought one of his self-portraits and introduced him to artists including Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

His painting developed considerably during the 1950s and 1960s. Early works were delicately handled, while by 1960 he was producing more heavily worked, encrusted surfaces in a series of atmospheric and increasingly abstracted beach paintings. Works from his 1960 Piccadilly Gallery exhibition were acquired by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Government Art Collection.

A visit to Florence and his encounter with the frescoes of Masaccio encouraged Tindle to adopt egg tempera, a medium that became central to his mature work. Built up through successive thin layers, the technique allowed him to achieve subtle gradations of tone, surface and light. His interiors and still lifes often bring inside and outside into close relation, with objects arranged near windows or open doors through which gardens or landscapes can be glimpsed.

Tindle has written of his work: “Perhaps I see religion frozen in time, but ready to break out of ordinary objects.” This sense of suspended time runs through much of his painting. Brian Sewell described him as belonging to a “quietly Romantic tradition of British art”, while Rachel Cooke later praised the emotional and narrative power of works such as Balloon Race, Clipston. Sewell himself owned several paintings by Tindle spanning five decades.

During the 1970s Tindle’s work was included in major survey exhibitions including British Painting ’74 at the Hayward Gallery and 25 Years of British Painting at the Royal Academy. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1973 and a Royal Academician in 1979, and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1981.

Alongside his studio practice, Tindle taught extensively, including at Hornsey College of Art and the Royal College of Art, and later served as Ruskin Master of Drawing at Oxford University. He also designed stage sets for the Aldeburgh Festival and was commissioned in 1986 to paint Sir Dirk Bogarde for the National Portrait Gallery. In 1982 he was one of twelve artists, alongside Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, invited to paint members of The Who for the album Face Dances.

Self-portraiture has remained an important strand of his work throughout his career. A major retrospective at Huddersfield Art Gallery in 2016 brought together paintings from across his career, including a number of self-portraits. Reviewing the exhibition in The Guardian, Rachel Cooke described Tindle as “one of the finest figurative painters of his generation”.

David Tindle is represented by The Redfern Gallery.