David Teachout

It was after a return from the U.S. Navy in the late 1950s and within the context of studying for a degree in landscape architecture that David Teachout began his formal development as a painter. First at Occidental College in his native California, where he was born in 1933, then at the University of North Carolina.  Abandoning university teaching to work in established design offices in 1964, he moved with his young family to Santa Cruz California in order to devote himself to painting and work as an independent environmental designer.

Teachout began his career as an abstract expressionist painter. Discovering an interest in color textures and gestures early on quickly gave way to color fields and simple compositions that allow color to be the prime element of expression. The importance of color led him to make distinctions in which contrast existed only because of color differences, as he began to see color as form. Simple shapes began to break off edges and eventually become shapes composed of bands of color interacting with each other and their ground. These bands became the object and were curved and linked at the ends into continuous bands of color.  

In the early 1980s, Teachout began a series of small works on paper utilizing views out of his studio windows as starting points for abstraction. Simultaneously, he was drawing from the figure. The works on paper evolved during the 1980s into a fully developed the Santa Cruz series of paintings. At all times, the movement was toward abstraction with the later paintings in the series being entirely self-referential. Various spatial and structural notions emerged in this series. For example, diagonals that appeared rather unconsciously in earlier works were given conscious consideration later in the series by crossing the diagonals as primary definitions of squares.