L'Officiel met with David West during his exhibition High Tension at Chinatown Soup where he’s showing recent pastel works that he created during the lockdown period

Interview and text by Coco Dolle

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I met with <a href="https://www.davidweststudio.com/">David West</a> during his exhibition High Tension at <a href="https://www.chinatownsoup.nyc/">Chinatown Soup</a>, an artist community on Orchard Street bordering New York&rsquo;s Lower East Side. It was a cold winter afternoon, and the first thing I noticed about him was that we were both wearing the same black wool mittens.&nbsp;David has lived in Paris for the past twenty years, exhibiting extensively in Europe and the United States. For High Tension, he&rsquo;s showing recent pastel works that he created during the lockdown period. This is David&rsquo;s first time back in New York in over a decade.

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Coco Dolle: You lived in New York in the 80s. Tell me more of your story here, now and then. 
David West: In the early 80s, I showed at the gallery of Gracie Mansion. She found me while I was working in experimental theatre in Chicago. Randolf Street Gallery had presented a few of my works, Gracie then brought my work to New York. Suddenly, I was showing here and then quickly in an international setting. Though I didn&rsquo;t like the mercantile feeling of New York in the 80s, I was a crazy young psychedelic nut, and I wound up in San Francisco in 1988. I left the city as I was going to take an apartment on Clinton Street. I went to teach a class in Chicago, and I found an enormous apartment for $200 a month! I didn&rsquo;t want to pay four times the price to live in New York. I thought to stay and spend the winter working and painting in Chicago, where I had gone to school. I had to paint for a show in LA next Spring. 
I came back to New York later after traveling between four cities&ndash;San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, and Paris. My life for about three years was on that route. I landed back here in New York in 1995 and won the Pernod Award that winter. It was kind of okay to stay this time with my portrait works. I stuck around until I met my now ex-wife. She&rsquo;s Franco-Danish, and she worked in the fashion industry. After 9/11, we wound up in Europe. She became pregnant. We had a child. And I had to weirdly start all over again.

 
CD: You mentioned you&rsquo;ve worked in Theatre. 
DW: Yes! Wearing all hats! I&rsquo;ve written, produced, directed, and worked with direct media, and I&rsquo;ve never stopped. I worked with a lot of different kinds of people.

CD: Tell us about your series of pastels. You created about 260 works during the lockdowns in Paris, from 2020 to 2022. 
DW: I only brought a selection of 30 works to Chinatown Soup. During that period, I spent time changing, growing, and moving. Not just learning about the materials that I was working with, but like with my series, The Bathers, it wound up being many pieces. It ran its course, but I spent five, six weeks in Venice during this period, which changed me too. I learned about <a href="https://www.lamaisondupastel.com/home.php?lang=en">La Maison du Pastel</a><a href="https://lamaisondupastel.com/"> </a>when I came back from Venice. I started a correspondence with them, and they sent me a box of half sticks, which changed my life! Do you know what it&rsquo;s like when you have an industrial chicken versus an organic chicken that had a good life? There&#39;s a similar difference between artisanal and industrial pastels. The complete series features in my book Sforzando published by <a href="https://goswellroad.com/online-store/books/">Goswell Road</a><a href="https://goswellroad.com">.</a>

CD: What medium were you using beforehand? 
DW: Before I began this crazy episode of drawing over 260 pastels, I was doing other works, like paintings on velvet and round pieces in watercolor. When you get down to the essence of the purity of the pigment, you&rsquo;ll find pastels and watercolors are the best. In the great French tradition of small companies and artisanal things made by family-owned companies, I found the Roch&eacute;&nbsp;family from Maison de Pastel. The colorist is also a chemist and a pharmacist. They&rsquo;ve just been honored by LVMH this last year at the Foundation Louis Vuitton.

CD: Tell us about the colored paper you are using and the density of your work&#39;s blue and purple hues. 
DW: Color is my obsession. I have developed my palette of blues, pinks, earth tones, and greens. Certain tones like Bengal Rose and Cadmium Green are my signposts, my connective tissues. When you start working with pure color, it becomes an extension of how you think. I use colors to explain what I can&rsquo;t say in words, somewhere between a feeling and a thought.

CD: How do you connect emotionally with colors? 
DW: When you&rsquo;re deep at work in your studio, you want a conversation to happen. The piece tells you where to go and when to end it. It&rsquo;s not like I have moments of genius all the time. Something has to happen to occur for a rapport. When it does, it&rsquo;s magic. And I&rsquo;m lucky. There is something metaphysical, and there is something reactive. Then there is something that needs to happen, something political and emotional. My little studio in Chateau Rouge is like a pressure cooker. As an artist, I&rsquo;m dealing with how we have to be to survive.

CD: Do you think working with pastel was another breakthrough for you? 
DW: It&rsquo;s a continuing breakthrough. Even the pauses&ndash;you come back to another level. I&rsquo;ve been through all these phases almost musically. They all add up, taking me somewhere I didn&rsquo;t know I was going to go. Now, I&rsquo;m addicted to pastels. I use my fingers a lot, and I was doing cool work before I started with pastels. Between painting and drawing&hellip;now I&rsquo;m somewhere else. I&rsquo;ve been through so many changes, that&rsquo;s what I do. All my passion goes through it.

CD: There is a sense of balance and sensuality in all of your works. Why is that? 
DW: I think I haven&#39;t lost being romantic. I am admittedly still affected by it. I guess I&rsquo;m in the right town in Paris. Let&rsquo;s say, I&rsquo;m a utopian romantic. My series The Bathers was about the joy of the female form. I took it pretty far even if it was only about six weeks. Part of that series is about isolation and about voyeurism and how we&rsquo;ve wound down a weird period. I will never be able to pull something off like that again. It&rsquo;s experiential by the way of working.

CD: What about your experience of the artistic relationship between New York and Paris? 
DW: In Paris, I&rsquo;ve had the opportunity to do things with certain invisibility and under the radar. I&rsquo;ve published many books. Here in New York, it would be impossible. Because they don&rsquo;t have the sense of intellectual and artistic pride that exists in Paris. Parisians love artists. They love art in a way that it&rsquo;s hard to fathom sometimes. Here in New York, the confusion is the market because every situation is prone to be squeezed. Everything has to be Foucauldian, a reference to a reference. When I&rsquo;m just trying to radiate love through my work and the altruism that comes with that. I&rsquo;m interested in beauty and that&rsquo;s my position. As I&rsquo;m completely myself in a purist state, my work offers pure color, pure emotions, and pure intellect. 
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David West @<a href="https://instagram.com/davidwest_studio?utm_medium=copy_link">davidwest_studio</a> 
<a href="https://www.davidweststudio.com/">www.davidweststudio.com</a>

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Ti troverò tra le nuvole (Venezia), 2020 Pastel on Hahnemühle paper (48cm x 63cm)

Twister' over the lagoon, 2020 Pastel on Fabriano Tiziano paper (50cm x 65cm)

Desertshore, 2021 Pastel on black paper (29.7cm x 42cm)

Banquette, 2021 Pastel on red-brown paper (50cm x 65cm)

Bruits (48 cm x 63 cm) June 8, 2021 Pastel on Hahnemühle paper

Paesaggio Mutante #2 (75 cm x 55 cm), Pastel on Canson paper

Installation view, from left to right: September, 2021, Poster paper (65cm x 50cm) - Reading #1, 2021, Poster paper (65cm x 50cm) - Reading #2, 2021, Poster paper (65cm x 50cm)

New York homecoming: an interview with artist David West

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