Biography
Gentleman grew up in Hertford, the son of artists who had met as painting students at the Glasgow School of Art. He attended Hertford Grammar School and to the St Albans School of Art, did national service as an education sergeant in the Royal Army Education Corps in charge of an art room in Cornwall, and then went to the Royal College of Art. He stayed on there as a junior tutor for two years before becoming a freelance artist ready to take on whatever work came his way, however unfamiliar. His only specific resolves on leaving the RCA at 25, were never to teach, commute, or work with anyone else, and so far he has kept them. He has lived and worked in the same street in Camden Town since 1956, and also in Suffolk, but this settled existence has periodically been punctuated by spells of travelling which, since he dislikes holidays, have almost invariably been connected with his work - longer periods in France, Italy, Spain and India, shorter spells in South Carolina, Africa, Samoa and Nauru, and Brazil. Whenever he has tired of one medium or preoccupation he has turned to another, but throughout his life there has been nothing he would rather have been doing. He has four children: a daughter by his first wife Rosalind Dease, a fellow-student at the RCA, and two daughters and a son by his second wife Susan Evans, the daughter of the writer George Ewart Evans.
His work is represented in Tate Britain, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Read more about this topic: David Gentleman
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