A studio visit with gestuo's launch artist — on painting movement, the discipline of the brushstroke, and why gestural art is having a moment.
David Handford's studio is quiet when we arrive. There are paintings leaning against every wall — most of them unfinished, or finished and waiting to be photographed. A single window throws northern light across the floor. Handford is mixing a colour that does not have a name.
Movement as material. "Most painters think about what to paint. I think about how it moves," he says, stirring. He is describing Kinetic Gesturalism — a term he coined for a style that treats gesture as the primary subject rather than a means to an end. The painting is not of something. It is of itself, in motion.
This is harder than it sounds. A gestural painter has to be both spontaneous and disciplined — free enough to follow the impulse, controlled enough to know when the impulse has run its course. Handford says he knows a painting is done when the next stroke would be the wrong one. "You feel it," he says. "Like a sentence that ends."
The discipline of the brushstroke. We ask him how long it takes to finish a piece. He laughs. "Some of these are forty-five minutes. Some are three weeks. The time is not the point. The point is whether the painting holds still long enough for you to look at it."
He works mostly in oil, occasionally in acrylic when a commission has a deadline. The canvases are large — he does not do small works. "Small works are exercises," he says. "I want the painting to fill the room."
Why gestural art, why now. "People are tired of screens," Handford says. "They want things that are made by a hand, in one go, with one impulse. A gestural painting is the opposite of a feed. You cannot scroll past it. It is already done."
He is right, and we think this is part of why gestuo exists. Commissioning a painting is one of the last transactions in which the buyer is paying for a person's time, attention, and taste — not a product. The artist's hand is the whole point.
Available on gestuo. Handford takes a small number of original commissions each year. Browse his portfolio at /artists/david-handford to see current work and request a commission.
David Handford
gestuo author