David Mulholland (1946–2005) was a painter from the north-east of England whose work primarily depicted the people and environment around his home in South Bank, North Yorkshire.
Although he spent seven years attending art colleges in London he continued to spend considerable time back home in South Bank, and the environment around there featured in most of the paintings and drawings that he exhibited in a retrospective show at Middlesbrough Art Gallery in 1972.
Due to his idiosyncratic approach to his work, he was not widely known when he died at the age of fifty-six from cancer of the throat.
The first of these, at the Dorman Museum in Middlesbrough (October 2012 – June 2013), prompted the editor of The Jackdaw to ask himself why he had not previously heard of David Mulholland and declared that his “work hit me immediately as authentic, born of intimate feeling for its subject".
[3] The second exhibition, at the Kirkleatham Museum (January – June 2014), received a five-star review in the Morning Star newspaper.