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David Cheer is a self-taught artist who began drawing in the early 1950s. Working primarily on paper with conté, pencil and charcoal, his art most commonly deals with landscape but frequently introduces fantasy, abstract, historical and war themes.
Generally rendered in dark, fluid, atmospheric detail, his subject matter is drawn from an eclectic range of interests - reflecting among other things his childhood in the central North Island backblocks, the interplay between Canterbury's weather and landforms, a subtle understanding of the relationship between psychology and mythology, an enduring fascination with the air battles of World War Two, sailing ships, stellar geology and his extensive, diverse, well-studied book collection.
Likened throughout his career to Blake, Durer, Piranesi, Goya and Rouault, critics appraising David Cheer's draughtsmanship have frequently used expressions relating to honesty, clarity, vision and perception while commenting on his vigour, spontaneity, masculinity and restless energy.
His work features in five public collections throughout the country, including the Robert MacDougall Gallery and the Hocken Library. Since 1963 he has exhibited in all major centres and in 1973 was guest exhibitor with The Group, which included such names as Hotere, McCahon, Woollaston, Trusttum and Wong. David Cheer will also be well known to readers of literary publications such as Landfall, Ascent and Islands, where his art has been frequently reproduced.
Born at Bells Junction, Rangitikei in 1931,
he has spent his entire artistic career in Canterbury, supporting himself
and his family through work as a carpenter. He lives in the Central Canterbury
settlement of Darfield.
Selected Exhibition History
18 May -
2 June 1968: David Cheer - Drawings of Fifteen Years; Canterbury Society
of Arts, Christchurch
March 1971:
(one-man show); University of Canterbury Club, Christchurch
August
1973: (one-man show); Canterbury Society of Arts, Christchurch
31 May
- 12 June: Drawings by David Cheer; Bowen Galleries, Wellington
November
1973: (one-man show); Erewhon Gallery, Dunedin
4 - 22
February 1974: David Cheer - The Land, The Line, The Artist and Death,
The Complete Form; Wellington
Settlement
Gallery, Wellington
22 February
- 8 March 1975: David Cheer - The Narrative of Death and Selected Landscapes;
Bosshard Gallery,
Akaroa
2 - 25
April 1975: (one-man show); The Downtown Art Gallery, Wanganui
July 1981:
Works on Paper by David Cheer; Canterbury Society of Arts, Christchurch
April 1984:
(one-man show); Westland Society of Arts, Greymouth
23 September
- 11 October 1985: David Cheer - Works on Paper; Aberhart North Gallery,
Auckland
26 November
- 16 December 1986: Drawings by David Cheer; Aberhart North Gallery, Auckland
March 1987:
(one-man show); Aberhart North Gallery, Auckland
February
1989: (one-man show); Aberhart North Gallery, Auckland
October
1988: David Cheer - Drawings; Canterbury Society of Arts, Christchurch
20 May
- 8 June 1991: David Cheer - Works on Paper; Aberhart North Gallery, Auckland
20 August
- 10 September 1993: Capriccio on the Creation of the World, Charcoal and
Pencil Drawings by David
Cheer;
Aberhart North Gallery, Auckland
October
1995 - Small Gallery, Akaroa - show with sculptor Llew Summers
What art commentators have said about the work of David Cheer:
"... a magnificently harmonious sense of
balance and tranquillity that has to do with the essence of being." Riemke
Ensing,
Sunday Star, 2-6-91
"... suggests a reconciliation between
the dark, and seemingly diametric, outer provinces of what is generally
perceived to
be reality." Peter Ireland, Art New Zealand,
Autumn 1987
"Action-packed is the best way to describe
Cheer's drawing. There is nothing passive about his viewpoint or way of
working." John Coley, Christchurch Star,
1-7-81
"... continually delights because, while
his drawings are instantly recognisable, each blazes his trail a little
further." John
Summers, The Press, 26-4-77
"... has proved many times that the most
humble medium, a pencil, in the hands of a man with a probing mind and
something
to say, can be more effective than any
amount of new media." GT Mofitt, The Press 9-3-69
"... the subject seems divorced from straight
documentation and one feels that the artist has isolated a telling fragment
of his
imagination." Quentin MacFarlane, The
Press 22-5-68
"It is a difficult art which can be felt
rather than explained: art of the mind which requires the closest study
if one is to get
the message. And it is well worth the
effort." John Oakley, Christchurch Star, 20-5-68
DAVID CHEER-VISIONARY by Ray Grover
David Cheer has been drawing pictures since
he came to Christchurch in the early 1950s. Expressing a vision that has
been conceived in solitude and which is
aggressive to any threat to its independence, it was probably inevitable
that it
would take many years before there was
even a degree of public recognition of his achievement. Entirely self taught
he
owes nothing to any art school. Neither
has he tagged along after current international modes. The links he has
are with
those Europeans of the past who expressed
their vision in line-a vision that is seen at its greatest in the etchings
of
Piranesi, the drawings of Goya, and the
pictorial works of Blake. In New Zealand his landscapes have similarities
with
Buchanan's Milford Sound and Heaphy's
Mount Egmont.
David Cheer works in pencil and he is a
master of the medium. The viewer is constantly surprised by the versatility
of his
use of it. Slender threads rise like the
tendrils of a rock pool plant, a few carefully placed strokes make a blank
page into a
snow field, and a dense blackness is a
mass in one picture and a void in another.
He rarely attempts to woo or charm his
viewers. His statements are curt and uncompromising. Often enigmatic, they
require
that we exercise our perception on them
over a period of time before we begin to discern what he is about.
There is a masculine toughness that we
tend to associate with those who fought at Monte Cassino or who settled
the
central North Island where he grew up
and which he frequently draws. When he depicts a landscape his scenes are
as
verifiable as those in the topographical
photographs he uses as preliminary recording sketches. On superficial examination
the pictures might appear to be little
more than examples of first rate draftsmanship but if the viewer allows
himself to ponder
on what he sees he will become aware that
the combination of craft and imagination transforms the photographic images
into strange and disconcerting metaphors.
A prospect of hills broken in for farming
is a vast flayed carcass, an overhanging cloud bank deliberately advances
as an
enveloping menace, and a weathered mountain,
its sleet-covered rock face meticulously drawn, becomes a dour
Prometheus. His imagination also responds
to phenomena beyond this world and we find ourselves confronted with the
vastness of the Milky Way and the cosmic
terror of a supernova explosion.
The forms in his most successful abstract
pictures share the same basic qualities of those found in his other works
in that
they are topographical, climatic, and
astronomical forms reduced to their essence. In these pictures a pattern
of hard black
lines follows the same rhythm as a landscape
of ridges. In another a pale asymmetrical cone licking upwards into a void
is
seen to have similarities with a sun flare.
The common source of the forms he uses becomes especially evident in those
pictures in which he combines the abstract
and the actual. These are amongst his most dramatic works.
His pictures may sometimes be still but
they are never static. There is one called "Forest" which has grass in
the
foreground, a beech forest with a peak
rising behind it in the middle, and a background of mist. The mist obscures
part of
the peak. The lines are softer than usual
and it is the nearest I have seen David Cheer come to depicting a conventional
landscape of romantic tranquillity. What
prevents it from being so is the mist. Looking at it we know that the mountain
and
the bush will soon be swept by a snowstorm.
There is a tension in all of his pictures,
the tension of opposing forces. When the eyes come to rest on one object
they
soon find that they are being made to
look at another which has been placed counter to it. At other times they
find
themselves moved because the point on
which they have fixed is not a discrete unit but is part of a continuum
and they are
soon gliding along from one line to another
like a train being switched through a marshaling yard.
The district where David Cheer was born
and raised is just south of Ruapehu in the hill country that extends from
Rangitikei
to Northern Taranaki. This country has
been washed into a tangle of ridges and valleys by a multitude of rivers
and
streams. At one time it must have been
flat because the summits of the hills rise to a pretty consistent thousand
feet. When
you see before you the jumble of ridges
and gullies and the uniform height of the summits the vista seems to have
no end.
The feeling of infinity is further enhanced
by the nature of the horizon. Perhaps it is because of the serrations visible
even
on the farthest ridges, but it appears
that earth and sky do not meet but extend onwards together.
If ever there was an environment that would
encourage a boy to feel that he existed in an infinite universe, it is
this one.
Even the bulk of Ruapehu would not set
a limit as the forces that thrust it up would be seen as a defiance of
the infinite
rather than a denial of it.
David Cheer is essentially a visionary
artist. From an early age it was impressed on his imagination that the
true reality was
to be found in the infinity and forces
of the universe. The key to it would be his imagination and the only limitations
would
be those that existed in himself. As a
visionary he would seek to go beyond the reality that was immediately apparent
to his
senses. But he would not reject this reality:
he knew it contained its own transcendence.
Ray Grover, a former NZ national archivist,
is a published fiction and non-fiction author and lifelong friend of David
Cheer.
This essay was originally written as
part of the catalogue for David Cheer's 1973 exhibition at the Canterbury
Society of
Arts in Christchurch.
Further information:
David Cheer
2 Snowdon Place
DARFIELD
Tel (03) 318 8288