David King

David King’s paintings conjure coastal skies at the edge of stormlight, mountains fading into mist, and landscapes glowing in the uncertain light between dusk and dark. A former principal baritone with Opera Australia, King came to painting after a career on the operatic stage—a shift that now feels both bold and inevitable.

King’s studio is crowded but not chaotic: a workbench dense with rollers, chisels, scourers, glue guns; canvases leaning against the walls; and, everywhere, the smell of wet oil paint lifting off the surface in faint vapours. In one corner, a nearly finished landscape — all scraped-back sky and telegraph poles — waits for its next intervention. In another, a pile of rags has been pressed into service as an impromptu palette.

King’s paintings are built through abrasion as much as addition. Brushes have largely disappeared from his practice. Instead, he reaches for sponges, scourers, scraps of card and, occasionally, a chisel, dragging paint across the board before scraping whole passages back to the surface beneath.

The resulting surface—layered and repeatedly reworked—is what some have described as King’s “punk impasto”. He deflects the description, though he understands why it has stuck. “It can be messy,” he says. “But you get these moments of magic unexpectedly.”

Paul Ryan, his neighbour-turned-mentor, once offered a piece of advice King still repeats today: “When the moment of magic happens, you’ll know it—and leave it alone.” The discipline, King suggests, is not in finding the moment but in resisting the urge to improve it. A scraped horizon, a sudden flare of ochre, a single pass of the sponge that resolves an entire hillside—once those things arrive, the work is simply to leave them be.

Following a standout appearance in the group exhibition Light Colour Landscape, King returned with his debut solo exhibition, Lines on the Landscape, in December 2025. Since then, he has established himself as one of the most compelling emerging voices in contemporary Australian landscape painting, his work earning admiration for its assured command of the medium.