David Trout is a South African artist, currently based in
Melbourne. He completed his undergraduate degree at the
Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, South
Africa. He later won a scholarship to study in the United States,
where he completed a Master of Fine Arts at Southern Illinois
University in 1988.
Trout's painting is defined by its preoccupation with
formal concerns, most notably compositional structure and
the interplay of colour. For Trout, the essence of abstraction
lies in the ability of these elements to combine in a manner that
encapsulates a particular moment. In this way, Trout's work
references situations borne out in his past, allowing abstraction
to function as the re-presentation of memory.