David Lloyd Glover was born in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, in 1949. His early years were spent at Royal Roads Hartley Castle, formerly the baronial estate of Sir Robert Dunsmuir, which had been converted to a military college where his father served as an administrator. There, surrounded by neo-classical architecture, traditional Japanese, English and Italian gardens, as well as the stunning natural beauty of the British Columbia seacoast, Glover's sensitivity to the relationship between man and nature was nurtured. It is this sensitivity, which is the focal point of his work. Glover's role models were his uncles, Guy Glover, a founder and President of the National Film Board of Canada, and Norman McLaren, a painter and pioneering film animator, the latter having been a particularly significant influence. In conversation Glover recalls McLaren's absolute absorption in the creative process, telling of when his uncle had shown him the 'wonderful' pattern of accidental scratches on a strip of film; scratches that would lead to an early method of synthesizing musical sound tracks. Speaking of his own work, Glover reveals his method: absolute absorption in his work. Careful tracing of a crack in the pavement. Complete immersion in the marriage of mist and sunlight. Through a blending of ambient atmosphere and crisp detail, Glover seeks to capture the essence of a particular time and place—a moment to be suspended in memory with brush, water, paint and paper.
Glover's watercolor technique is largely based on that which is not done, and that which is not there. Paying close attention to the water, he cultivates degrees of colorlessness thus giving the painting to the light, which is softly diffused through the translucent pigments, so the painting is illuminated from within. Rather than rendering form through the definition of mass, Glover often merely suggests substance by painting the shadows that cling to form. Through this use of shadow-the light which is not there-he conjures ghosts of bare paper to be fleshed out by the viewer s imagination. The simple truth of existence is expressed through this technique, as the viewer is compelled to imagine detail, which inevitably melts away into the totality of the moment. There is no clever conceptual statement here, no striving for personal expression, only the seeking of high moments through the observation of nature and the practice of art.
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