ALAN DAVIE | BEGINNING OF A FAR-OFF WORLD
He was a painter, a poet, a textile designer, a jeweller, a teacher, a jazz musician, and so much more. Alan Davie refused to be pigeon-holed, which is why, despite enjoying something greater than cult status, his work, surely, remains underrated.
Alan Davie, Good Morning My Sweet, Courtesy of Alan Davie Estate
Though not in Scotland, where he was born, brought up and educated. This exhibition, at the Dovecote Studios in Edinburgh, celebrates the centenary of his birth, and displays work from every decade of his career (he died in 2014, aged 93).
Davie dabbled in abstract expressionism, but soon realised its limits, and went on to create a style of his own, drawing on an eclectic range of influences, mainly borrowed from cultures that were steeped in the mystic (he was a great traveller). His work, full of symbolism, talismans and totems, was intuitive: he often cited the book ‘Zen and the Art of Archery’ which describes the beautiful moment in which archer, arrow and target become one: an analogy for his painting. “Images are not made as art objects,” he once stated, “but as channels of communication with the Divine.”
The centrepiece of this show (on until October 24) is a large, brightly coloured carpet made in a collaboration with Dovecote Studios; perhaps more interesting is the work he produced before the mid-seventies, when his shaman-like, improvisational powers were at their height.
Davie is represented by Alan Wheatley Art, who will be exhibiting some of his paintings at Stand 18 of the 2022 British Art Fair, among that of other artists, including Patrick Heron, Christopher Wood, Bridget Riley and Roger Hilton.