In 1977, The Numbers were approached by impresario Rod Swenson, who was seeking musicians to form a backing band for singer Wendy O. Williams, whose radical persona he sought to exploit as punk music and performance art.

The Numbers became The Plasmatics but the attention David began to gain as an important voice in the art world caused him to leave the band to pursue his burgeoning painting career.

In 2000, he developed the "Chortens" and "Populations" series, about which prominent art historian and critic Donald Kuspit writes: "They are enigmatic works, all the more so because of the way their innumerable details form singularly monumental, intimidating wholes.

"[2] In 2001, David developed bi-lateral neuropathy due to being poisoned by gases released by overheated beeswax used in the encaustic process.

When neuropathy rendered him unable to paint during 2003, he returned to the 20x24 camera and shot large-format Polaroids inspired by Caravaggio; nude men and women dressed as Toreadors, and religious imagery.

David's work was reviewed in Artforum and Art in America, and is considered one of the last links to the New York School of painting.

To me they make it transparently clear that immediacy may be an illusion to the intellect but it is not one for the senses—for touch and sight, mingled together inextricably in ecstatic perception.

For them, painterly immediacy is ultimate reality: pure sensuous intensity transcendent of ordinary, habitual understanding of the world, which is mediated by socially sanctioned language and banal meanings that force sense experience into their procrustean bed.