David Welsh was born in Derbyshire (1937), and educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge. Now retired, his main career has been as a teacher, but painting has never been far behind, especially in the last ten years. He enjoys portrait painting as well as landscape work where his specialities are the effect of light, often on water, and interesting and dramatic clouds and skies. He has always worked in oils, a medium that he finds very suitable for all the effects he wants to achieve.

He has been much influenced by a group of contemporary English artists, who are not Avant-garde, but rather proceed from the Impressionist tradition. He admires, among others, artists like Roy Petley, Fred Cuming, Ken Howard and Bernard Dunstan.