The next progressive phase of David Rayson’s studio-based research is to explore and voyage into the ‘unknown’, charting new possibilities through drawing and painting adventures that lie just over the horizon. By utilising and then challenging familiar building blocks, known motifs and inherited methods of mapping, the project will continue his research into the function of drawing (as in ‘drawing out’) and test the conventions underpinning narrative communication, self-expression and drawing as a residue of the act of searching out. This voyage is of course a fiction that will utilise all that suburban life has to offer regarding modes of escapism such as TV, travel brochures and daydreaming during the daily commute.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe longed to go to sea, not it seems to aspire to get to somewhere else, but out of a strong and somewhat irrational compulsion to simply be at sea. David Nobb’s Reginald Perrin became so eroded by the routine and daily grind of work and suburban life that one day made a neat pile of his 9-to-5 clothes on a beach and walked out in to the sea.

From 2004 to 2009 Rayson’s research exclusively explored the possibility of drawing as a responsive and reflective medium to critique, subvert and make fantastic the experience of living in everyday suburbia. Formally the medium enabled him to explore the graphic language of drawing, such as trace, automatic drawing and appropriation, and how these tendencies are able to deliver, collide with and extend conventions of fictional narrative, factual documentation, fantastical projection and diary. The drawings were purposefully produced utilising everyday materials: felt pens and sugar paper on a domestic scale.

This four-year drawing project explored an internal relationship with the suburban day, working as a diaristic account to make the everyday fantastic. The project resulted in a solo show at Marlborough Gallery, London, and a widely distributed publication of 100 drawings, David Rayson – The Everyday Fantastic.

Accompanying the exhibition were presentations on the developing project at The Open University; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; University of Northampton; University of Wolverhampton University; Burren College of Art, Ireland; Jerwood Gallery, London; and Slade School of Fine Art, University College London – as well as the inaugural professorial lecture The Everyday Fantastic at the Royal College of Art and David Rayson in Conversation with William Feaver at The Prince’s Drawing School.

The exhibition was reviewed and favourably discussed in many art journals and newspapers, including Time Out, The Guardian, Spectator Magazine, and The Week.

In 2010 David Rayson served as selector and curator along for The Threadneedle Prize, along with Xavier Bray (National Gallery) and Michael Sandle (Royal Academy of Arts). An exhibition was held at the Mall Galleries in September 2010, accompanied by a series of events and debates with invited speakers such as Matthew Collings, Bethany Hughes, Jeremy Paxman and Jon Snow.

This 2009 publication, edited by Christoph Ruckhaberle and Thomas Siemon and published by Kaleid Editions and The Schauspiel, Spinnerei ‘Rundgang’ includes a series of eight linocuts entitled The Ship. Other artists featured in the exhibition and the final publication include Mark Titchner, Adam Dant, Claas Gutsche, Julie Verhoeven, Bob Matthews, Andrzej Klimowski, Richard Woods, Serena Korda and Karl-Georg Hirsch.

Land/Water consists of artists, writers and curators who embrace a diversity of creative and critical practices. As a research group it operates as a forum for interrogation of nature and culture, aesthetics and representation. Questioning imagery and practices relating to land, landscape and place is central to its ethos. During the symposium a variety of visual arts research approaches were discussed which questioned the notion of landscape and the metaphysical, such as time, space, existence, reality, being, perception, ontology and transcendence. Invited speakers include Peter Cusack (USA), Mike Evans (UK), Jane Grant (UK), Jo Love (UK), David Rayson (UK) and David Williams (USA).

The inaugural exhibition celebrated the opening of the Sackler Building in 2010, home of the Painting programme’s new Battersea studios. The exhibition showcased 10 years of Royal College of Art graduates and visiting tutors, such as Sophie Von Hellermann, Gillian Carnegie, Ansel Krut, George Shaw, Paul Housley, Ryan Mosely, Milly Thompson, Rose Finn-Kelscey, Varda Caivano, Katy Moran, Nigel Cooke, Neal Tait and Chantal Joffe. The accompanying publication included essays by Sir Christopher Frayling and David Rayson.

In this 2009 commission, David Rayson was invited to produce a double-paged spread for the seminal painting journal Turps Banana, issue 6. Rayson responded to this commission by exploring the potential of collage, overlaying many sections of specifically produced drawings. Previous commissioned artists include Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Ryan Mosley and Keith Tyson.