David was born in Norwich in 1951. He studied painting at the Central School of Art & Design in London where Adrian Berg taught him to think, Blair Hughes-Stanton taught him a respect for materials and craftsmanship, and where Cecil Collins inspired and provoked.

He began to learn how to draw when he started teaching life painting at the Workingman’s College in Camden while still a student, and in 1976 his first one-man exhibition at Parkway Focus in Camden Town was made up of figurative work. After two visits to Brazil in 2004 his work has changed dramatically and he is now preoccupied with constructing mixed media constructions, some of which may still be called paintings.

Forty years of immersion in art, continuous reading and visiting galleries resulted in the giving of his first formal lectures in Art History in 2008, something that he has included informally in his teaching for many years.