About Donald Young
THE ARTIST:
With illness cutting my design and build landscaping career short, I turned to painting to focus my mind away from the pain.
Having spent the last 30 years creating landscapes for people wanting to transform their outdoor space, I decided to leave landscapes behind me and move on to new challenges.
To understand where my influences lie, I go back to my childhood, where as a child I was one of the last people to get a colour TV. We always had to watch "Top of the Pops" in black and white and imagine what the performances looked like in colour. This inspired me to go big on colour in my art work.
It is little wonder then, that my artistic process involves collating a mixture of black and whit footage of my subject matter and then working the colour back in.
My landscaping career both helps and hinders my artistic journey. I had been designing for decades, which helps me put my vision into reality; but I have also been levelling and squaring things up, even when I inevitably visualise the subject at an angle...and then the battle commences.
THE JOURNEY:
It all started in the back garden during Covid when my family and I started painting portraits of each other. I then moved on to reimagining old black and white family photos from the 1930's. One such photo was of my Granny walking down Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow where she was snapped by a photographer who would then pass on his details if you wanted a copy, quite a common practice back then. This led to my first commission, a request for a guitar hero of the era Django Reinhardt. This is where my process began I enjoyed every aspect of creating this piece, the music the research, the music and the freedom I felt putting paint to canvas so much that I was hooked, I shifted my focu on to the greats of our musical past and present in a way that spreads the colour, the music and the joy that these titans of music bring us on to the canvas to enjoy for all time.
NOW:
I have been painting continually for many years now and I am always striving to develop my artwork further, never wanting to get too comfortable. I am always pushing my ideas in terms of the colours and tools I use to the limit. This creates a bold and yet cohesive body of work all with their subtle differences.
My constant battle between my old and new selves in terms of what I used to be able to do as opposed to what I can do now, in the battle between expectations of my old self where a 16 hour working day was the norm to extreme pacing where 45 minutes is the max is what makes my work unique.
I see my work as a reflection of myself in the image of someone else.