About David Livesey

​

David Livesey was born in Bolton in 1930. He spent his early childhood in Preston, but when he was nine, at the start of the Second World War his family moved back to Bolton.

 

From an early age he was a keen observer of the colourful life of an industrial town, committing to memory all the wonderful characters in the extended family that circulated round his grandmother’s cottage next to the cemetery where his grandfather dug the graves.

 

David studied at Bolton Art College and then in 1945 moved to Surrey and the start of a career in the British Film Industry. His first job was at Gaumont British Animation Studios  where young artists were being trained in the skills of animation, the latest thing in moving pictures.

 

National service in the RAF came and went leaving David free to join a group of former Gaumont colleagues to establish their own animation house in London, producing the earliest black and white commercials and cartoon series for television. 

 

In 1957 he formed Group Two Animation Ltd in Richmond, Surrey, producing more than 250 TV commercials in B/W and colour as well as multiple episodes of the earliest cartoon series including The Beatles, Dodo, the Lone Ranger, and a string of sequences for the seminal Beatles’ film “Yellow Submarine”.

 

By now he was also pioneering a technique using Xerography on cel in Britain, a crucial step that was to accelerate hand drawn animated film production. 

 

After Group Two Animation followed 30 years as a key animator on some classic films including “The Snowman”, “Christmas Carol” and “Wind in the Willows”. In the 1990’s David also taught animation for the British Animation Training Scheme at the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) on the South Bank, London until its closure in 1999. 

 

David retired from animation in 2003 and moved to the Isle of Man, where he has revived his first love, painting.  More than seventy years later all those vivid characters from that childhood in wartime in Bolton have been given life on the canvas. 

 

He published two illustrated books of Manx Folk Tales before starting to paint the “My Northern Paintings” series, which currently includes 42 works, with plans for plenty more.