david tolley

header pics by Elizabeth Bell

Thank you for visiting this blog – DT

NB: If you’d like to listen to some of David’s music, click this link
TPP track extracts on SOUND CLOUD

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A NOTE TO ALL VISITORS:

OUR  BELOVED  DAVID  DIED  AT  HIS  HOME,  5:15  PM.  ON  FEBRUARY  20,  2014. 

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WE WISH TO KEEP THIS SITE ACTIVE TO HONOUR DAVID’S WORK AND TO CONTINUE TO CONNECT WITH ONGOING ACTIVITIES THAT SOMEHOW DRAW FROM OR RELATE TO HIS ENERGY/LEGACY.

Ren Walters, SEPTEMBER 2016.

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Dur-é Dara (David’s life partner) and I are adding materials to this site to make some of David’s work accessible to the public. We aim to retain much of the original site and simply add what we can when we uncover visual or aural works.

There is a large collection of audio works produced to CD that we would like to share with the public, and we are currently considering the most effective way of achieving this.

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David Tolley, SELF PORTAIT, 2011, 1550h X 1110w acrylic on canvas

 

This blog is a way for me to gather and publish a range of stuff that has to do with my life and work. I’ll soon hit 77 and the spectre of mortality hovers. Time left relative to my relationship with art and music and time left to organise the things I have amassed in my daily life, becomes crucial.

The idea of a blog insinuated itself. Naively perhaps but the ‘blog’ seems to me to have developed into a real-time, real-world document as distinct from the, static, indelible forms – audio recording, video and DVD, film and the literary and photographic tomb (just a thought!).

So over time I’ll post various aspects of my work hopefully striking a balance between the needs of my current work and working processes and the documentation of past and present as creatively as this blog format permits.

ABOUT MY WORK:

For many years image, object, and sound making have all competed for a fair share of attention. Among these, interactive improvisation with other performance composers has been particularly insistent. All these elements have supported each other, and sustained me, throughout my life and there has been no conflict, just limited time.

My considerations and decision-making in painting, my current favoured art process, are indistinguishable from those in sounding or anything else in fact. Regardless of media, methodology and style, I am always concerned with the dynamic and interactive, with processes of inter-relationship and inter-dependence. Media and procedure are inter-determined and all of it is an expression of mind energy interactions and of the frailty and impermanence of everything.

Teaching has reflected my concerns as an artist in these realms, functioning as another art process and I have been blessed with a number of very special individuals as students. Many have been at a basic level of art and music investigation – nonetheless stimulating for me – and many have been at the ‘turning point’, that indecipherable stage where ‘student’ becomes ‘artist’ and ‘teacher’ or ‘guru’ becomes colleague. Suffice to say it is a difficult period, if not an illusion, often sticky with emotive confusion. I won’t discuss them in this context though I am often blessed with their declarations of my place in their creative energy and often feel pride in their achievements. This blog is dedicated to them all.

DT, © 2010, revised © 2013