There is a melancholy to David Thorogood’s paintings.
It lives in the earthy human figures and fragmented forms that emerge from his beautiful, yet sometimes dark, work.
Using layers of paper, paint, bitumen, collage and sculptural elements, David is processing a lifetime of experiences that may otherwise have remained buried.
His path to becoming a full-time artist has been anything but conventional. He studied sculpture in Wolverhampton in his twenties, taught for a while and became a jazz bassist before going to circus school in Bristol. He toured with Snapdragon Circus and Full Tilt Stilts, even travelling as far as southern Spain performing street theatre and playing bagpipes on stilts.
“I did everything,” he laughs. “I was a juggler as well, and we used to run workshops for kids.”
David discovered that the expressive freedom of circus gave him access to emotions he had previously struggled to feel. “The training was emotionally cathartic and intense. I think doing circus was a lead-in to psychotherapy for me.”
As an Arts Psychotherapist, he spent seven years as a school counsellor in the UK, working with troubled children. But alongside his professional understanding of trauma, David was carrying his own.
His relationship with his mother was affected by the trauma surrounding her pregnancy. While pregnant, she returned from London to her native Norway, where she was stalked by her fiancé, physically assaulted by her father, threatened with a forced abortion and ostracised by her friends.
Finally, she emigrated to England leaving behind her family, country and mother tongue forever. Her experiences contributed to a profound sense of disconnect between mother and child that reached back to David’s earliest days.
Arts Psychotherapy gave him a framework for understanding that history and painting offered a way to express it. He doesn’t sit down with a subject in mind or consciously decide what he needs to express. The images begin as figure drawings from life but are painted freely and quickly, allowing accidents so that unconscious images can appear spontaneously.
Months later, he may recognise something buried within the work. “Suddenly I see it and go ‘blimey, I’ve painted it again’.” It emerges quite unconsciously.
See David’s work in The Artist’s Window at Talented Friends Gallery, The Village Walkway, Caloundra throughout September and October 2026.
