David was born (1990) and raised in Bloemfontein. He completed his BA in Fine Arts at the University of The Free State in 2012. Since then, he has been a full-time artist and illustrator of picture books. In 2015, he moved to Cape Town, where he currently lives a free-lance life and exhibits regularly. He has exhibited in many galleries in South Africa and also in France during an art residency at Draw International in Caylus.

His drawings may just seem like whimsical fantasy scenes, but in reality the themes he tries to visualise are often very serious and highly personal. His art hovers between playfulness and solemnity, whimsicality and thoughtfulness. Occasionally, he uses picture book illustrations as an idiom to express his ideas. Illustration per se is not seen by many as part of the ‘Fine Art’ family, but more as a bastard child born of an outrageous union between word and image. His pictures are his own restless bastard children. Not quite at home in art galleries, nor at ease among the covers of a book, they, like their creator, feel safest in the periphery, the threshold and the border.
Of course, there are themes, metaphors, symbols and concepts that recur in his work. An analogy can be made with the currents that form channels in the chaos of the sea. The travelling nomad, displacement, alienation, destruction and melancholy are examples of the currents that find their way into the ocean of his mind. Among these works are whimsical and often quite random references to literature, such as Franz Kafka, Nietzsche, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T.S Elliot.

He finds as much inspiration in literature as in art history, and he often uses a prominent (but also ambiguous) sense of narrative in his drawings. In summary, his art practice is an act of building a parallel universe, one drawing at a time.