David A. Haughton was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1956 and moved to Canada in 1991. He has been exhibiting for over thirty years. In the mid 1980s, Haughton began defining an original artistic style. He captures the essence of what he is seeing with a quick sketch, then paints layer upon layer of glaze and scumble.

Haughton has extensively painted the wild west coast of British Columbia with its stormy clouds, sparkling waters and ships at sea. Other series have captured the deep rich tones of Dordogne, Provence and Tuscany and the intense clarity of the light in Greece. He has exhibited in Zurich, Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and Vancouver, and his work hangs in private and corporate collections worldwide.

Haughton’s artistic role model is the Japanese master Hokusai, who strove to keep learning and growing well into his ninties. He hopes to achieve a state where his “every line and dot on the page is alive”. Other artistic heroes include Cezanne, Winslow Homer, Van Gogh and Goya: all primarily self-taught, independent and somewhat solitary artists with self-reflective tendencies.

With the Kindertotentanz paintings, Haughton wrestles with the moral ambiguities of modern medicine (he trained as a medical doctor at Harvard College and Cornell University Medical College, and currently is a pediatric emergency doctor), mining themes akin to Goya’s Disasters of War and Black Paintings.