Adrift on the World: The Art of David Tees

David Tees has been drawing almost every day for the past 40 years, in a journey which has traversed continents and judicial systems.

He was born in London, southern Ontario, in 1972 and moved to Vancouver cresting twenty.

I was always drawing. If you play music you play guitar all your life. I didn’t suddenly decide to pick up my pencil and become an artist. It’s something I’ve done all my life.

THC (2018) Acrylic on Canvas, 80cm x 60cm. 2018 © David Tees

In his words, Tees studied graphics, 3-D animation, had a kid, got drunk, did a lot of drugs, not necessarily in that order.

That was when I first started painting. 94, 95. I did ten proper paintings in just under a year, and was working with a screen company. Used the silk screen frames they threw away as my first canvases.

It was all Salvador Dali surrealist up against Heavy Metal Magazine. I showed them to some people and that was how I got my first show. 94. At a place called The Underground, which was a store in Vancouver which sold vintage clothing when it was a new thing back in the 1990s. Goth black clothing was popular. Grunge. Kurt Cobain had just died. They were just opening a brand new store, a new flag ship with these big display windows. They put them all around.

End of the Road (1994) Acrylic on Silk, 150cm x 180cm. 1994 © David Tees

David Tees spent nine years teaching English and graphic design in Korea, drawing all all the time. He also worked for Samsung, started foreigner magazines. Working and promoting bands. CD covers.

He got married and spent ten years in Korea. It wasn’t a very good breakup, he says with typical understatement.

He recorded the whole experience, which ends in prison in Korea for unpaid fines, in his book Pens Available on Thursday, Paper Available Next Tuesday…

The blurb records:

When David tz found himself divorced from his Korean wife and jobless, he decided he was done with Seoul and South Korea. However, his downward spiral into booze left him in debt and owing $10,000 in fines to the Korean Government.

When he tried to leave the country, he had to pay his fines or else…

I was bored in prison so I drew one picture a day. I could buy a pen on Thursday and paper on Tuesday. Hence the name of the book.

I kept a journal and a diary, drew all these pictures, and wrote the book out of that material. That time in jail. I have all the drawings as a collection, the date. Whatever I was looking at. Friends in Korea brought me books to read. The books had pictures so I would copy them, or whatever was in my immediate vicinity.

I drew a picture of my cell from the reflection in the camera.

Of course I was drawing the whole time, what else was I going to do?

I kept it all, and when I got back to Canada published it all.

Dragonfly (2018) Acrylic on Canvas, 30 cm x 30cm. 2018 © David Tees

I was in Bangkok for three years and started rebuilding my inventory. I had some paintings stolen in Bangkok. When I was in jail I did a whole lot of pen and ink drawings. I was taking them and doing them in colour. I was copying my own artwork.

I did some murals for a restaurant, and some websites. Occasionally I would teach English. For a while I worked for a Roman Catholic school and lived on the campus.

Rest (2019) Acrylic on Canvas, 60cm x 35cm. 2019 © David Tees

I was near Patpong and sat in a lot of go-go bars and drew pictures of the girls dancing. I filled a dozen sketch books. Girls are always dancing, moving, so you have to be really quick. For a picture which doesn’t move.

I did not follow the rules of the school campus as it was essentially a monastery and I was not a monk. They eventually kicked me out for whoring around.

I got bored of that so went to Cambodia and did it there for a while.

Got bored with that, and came to Vietnam for the last three years, minus the whoring around.

Butterfly (2018) Acrylic on Canvas, 20cm x 20cm. 2018 © David Tees

The painting has evolved a lot over the years, Tees says.

“Before it was more photographic or fantasy illustration. Now it is more abstract. There’s a lot of biological elements to it. I like the idea that most of the stuff I paint is closeups or macros, microscopic versions of something. Blow up of a cancer cell or a brain cell.

“I also use a lot of modern techniques I would not have been able to do 500 years ago. The traditional sense of paint on canvas, but the subject is more modern.

“I would not be able to paint a microscopic version of a fly’s eyes without technology. At the same time I am using classic techniques to share these images. To show them a world they maybe don’t see, but is right in front of them, at a microscopic level.

MDMA (2018) Acrylic on Canvas, 80cm x 60cm. 2018 © David Tees

“Painting the light through a raindrop. You can grab that raindrop as it is falling, catch the reflection of the street. People upside down. You can look at the world in a different perspective, people might not see. But it is right there in front of you.”

Everyone walking by is immune to what is happening around them, how things in the world interact with each other.

Everything plays off each other. It is an ongoing process, incorporating things that are natural, God like things, but it is more science oriented, physics. Reality. The idea there is a God is just ridiculous, it is too neat. The world is chaotic. The idea that we were created is just too neat.

2019 © Glen Riley
https://instagram.com/gtrphotographic

The idea of the art is to show the chaoticness of real life, how it is all happening by chance, not by some predetermined destiny. The building blocks of atomic structure, cell structure, is so off by just one decimal point, which means chaotic. It is not created. It is a random thing. Every time I create a piece of art it is totally different from the first one.

I am having an argument with Creationism. It is an existential argument. Is there or is there not a God? Is the world random or predetermined by some greater being. No matter how many times you create the same thing, it will never be the same. The art is my attempt to show it is just randomness.