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David Carr

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The Artists Estate

David Carr; the Discovery of an Artist by Bryan Robertson & Ronald Alley, Quartet Books 1987, page 97.

From about 1949 until the end of the 1950's, Carr sustained his theme of Man and Machine, a long and powerful sequence of oil paintings. Carr sought to make an imaginative fusion or formal synthesis between the human form and the machine in a series of complex structures. The range of colour was always simple but rich; Indian red, orange, blue, black grey and ochre and variations of these colours.

In these factory paintings of which Biscuit Factory Workers is one of the earliest examples, Carr has no interest in the decorative treatment of the figure and the machine, they are more spaciously set out and balanced as in Leger's compositions. There is a feeling of the creation of a new hybrid, in which man and machine are beginning to morph; any natural colour disappearing from the workers complexions as they disappear into the middle ground of the composition, no longer the significant forefront of the painting.

It is important to note that during this period Carr became aware of the family biscuit business (Peek Frean Biscuits) as a possible source of imagery and his paintings of men and machine such as this important example came directly from visits to the factory in Bermondsey in 1949; a defining moment in Carr's artistic oeuvre.