Bob Davison. Paintings and Drawings

Introduction: Robert Davison, Borders, 2016

Like Emile Nolde and his ‘Forbidden Watercolours’, Bob Davison often starts with a flower head. But unlike Nolde whose colours saturate us as we stare into the interior of a flower, Davison’s luminous paintings extend spatially outward into the border, and on further still to the wider landscape ‘field’.

As well as close scrutiny of plants in studio and garden, he typically gathers sensations whilst out on a walk or out bird watching. In other words - and following the Picasso maxim - Davison doesn’t so much seek these encounters, as find them on the way to doing something else.

Distracted from distraction, by distraction (1).

Davison loves paint and understands how it behaves. He improvises by using makeshift stencils, or casting dry pigment into areas of wet paint. Going into his studio you enter a room that celebrates the particular form of intelligence that painting represents - a multitude of tactile and visual judgments deployed to articulate sensation and idea.

Stacked against the studio wall are numerous drawing boards used to stretch paper. On these he mixes paint and mediums with charcoal and pencil, making drawings that initiate ideas, help advance a partially developed painting, or sometimes merely an event in itself that may never go beyond that arena.

Over time Davison has developed a vocabulary of painterly signs that circulate around figuration and abstraction. A cascade of ‘wobbly’ circles is reminiscent of fractured light caught in a camera’s lens.
A cluster of long, dragged brush-strokes that individually might read as seed heads sets up a floating, jostling movement through repetition. Then there’s the increasing transparency of paint which not only enables layers of under painting to be sensed, but also signs the shifting appearance of things.

This developing transparency is something that connects Davison to his native Norfolk and his passion for the watercolours of Cotman and contemporaries. Like so many artists, his current preoccupations can be traced to formative passions.

Stewart Geddes MPhil RCA, RWA (Trustee)

(1) T. S. Eliot (1936) Burnt Norton: Collected Poems 1909 - 1935 London, Faber and Faber

About Looking

Borders: outlines and edges, but, also, national boundaries, flower beds and frames. Borders define areas but also propose the ambiguity of a place of transition: where precisely are you as you cross the border from one state to another? Where precisely does the town end and the country begin?

The notion of a borderland is apt for Bob Davison’s art which occupies the liminal state between figuration and abstraction, mirroring perceptual processes which integrate objective observation with the subjectivity and ambiguity of memories and feelings.

The mystery and magic of seeing is that, unlike a camera’s mechanical recording of data, our vision
is constantly informed and coloured by experience both consciously and unconsciously: what lies beyond the border of consciousness shapes what lies within; what lies outside our immediate frame of vision informs what we see inside.

Davison’s subtle and beautiful meditations on nature and memory, on colour and form, are rich counterpoints to the mechanistic images which dominate our contemporary culture and ways of seeing. Pictures are everywhere. In 1964 Susan Sontag wrote Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction (1); half a century on, our visual culture is super-saturated with images. The camera has a lot to answer for.

The gifts of photography to knowledge – and to art – have been prodigious. But photography has spoiled us, too. We have been spoiled, not just by the superfluity of images - is there any thing, any place, that has not yet been photographed, that we cannot ‘see’ and know through this extraordinary medium? - but it has also spoiled us in the very act of perception.

Lee Friedlander, wanting a snapshot of his uncle with his new car noted that, I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and seventy-eight trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography. (2)

Generous to a fault. The camera’s gaze reveals everything in fascinating, but superficial, detail. Human perception might seem a poor thing next to the revelatory detail furnished in a high definition, colour saturated, digital image, showing us all the visual information we would otherwise have overlooked - and, perhaps, it has made us lazy; in Sontag’s view, the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience (3). We see only the surface appearance; we need to look harder.

Which is where drawing and painting comes in. Bob Davison’s pictures offer rich pleasures and demand prolonged looking: they embody the recognition that the fullest experience of the world is dependent not on mere knowledge and information (both in overwhelmingly plentiful supply in our digital world) but on looking, thinking, acting and feeling. (John Constable declared painting is... feeling (4).

Visual perception is more than data collection: it is informed by movement and emotion, memories and imagination. The human eye is never still; it is constantly scanning and calculating, discriminating and selecting. We experience the world by moving through it. We see what is interesting and important to us – what is meaningful. These sights and the accompanying sensations and emotions are stored away as memories – imperfectly, perhaps – to inform subsequent perceptions.

Remembering a selection of Davison’s paintings and drawings seen during a recent visit to his studio, I remember, in particular, a scattering of bright yellow flowers (Welsh poppies, perhaps?) a swathe
of curious, white oblong forms rhythmically dispersed across the canvas (sometimes suggestive of blossom, sometimes of patterns of light), the elegant silhouettes of complex plant forms.

When I return to look again I find that (of course) my recollections are inadequate. The richness, complexity and subtle layering of Davison’s work mean that – unlike ‘reading’ a photograph which can deliver a great deal of information very quickly (and need not detain the viewer for very long) – the paintings demand, and repay, prolonged scrutiny and even then do not exhaust their visual pleasures, for each further viewing will reveal fresh colours, forms and textures.

The achievement of these paintings is hard won: Davison’s study of nature and art has been intense resulting in his mastery both of drawing from nature and of the language of painting. The story of modern painting has broadly been a dance (sometimes a battle) between figuration and abstraction – for a while total abstraction was the dominant mode (and Davison’s early work shows his mastery of a minimalist style) but, today, a fruitful dialogue (cross-border discussion) is possible, and Davison’s work is exemplary in this respect. As flowers dance in a breeze, so shapes and forms in the paintings dance between figure and abstraction: forms dissolve and reform in the ambiguous, translucent space of shadows and reflections. It is a mark of great painting that form and content are, as here, inseparable from each other.

To return, finally, to Susan Sontag’s reflections on modern visual culture: her prescription to counter what she sees as the dulling effect of our over exposure to images is simple: What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more (5). The gift of Bob Davison’s luminous paintings is precisely to reward the act of looking with an apprehension of the beauty and mystery of the world before us: to cross the border between appearance and sensation, between looking and feeling.

Richard Salkeld

1 Susan Sontag (2009) Against Interpretation and Other Essays London: Penguin, p13

2 Galassi, Peter (2005) Friedlander, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, p14

3 Susan Sontag, ibid., p13

4 Stephen F. Eisenman (2011) Nineteenth Century Art, London: Thanes & Hudson, p232

5 Susan Sontag, ibid., p14

An Introduction: Robert Davison, Paintings and Drawings, 1994

Aenium, Ananas, Avocado and Aloe; Begonia, the Bromeliads and a Banana; Fatsia, Ficus and a huge Kentia Palm; a Monstera and a Yucca: these and many others are names from that forest of plants that can be taken inside, from outside, from distant places and which are massed in Bob Davison’s studio, spilling over from a surrounding balcony. Large sprays of dried leaves hang against the wall, particularly the Acanthus with those spiky flowers and deep cut the leaves that were so central to classical decorative motifs. Nature is patiently reassembled in Architecture and the studio becomes the context and the subject matter of the drawings and paintings that are created there.

Davison has been using this stimulus since the early ‘80s, following his student days when he was engaged with a minimalist position. It has allowed him to draw with careful observation and particularity the plants themselves, like a botanist in thrall with a slice of the world which becomes in his eyes the whole world. It has also allowed the drawings and paintings to grow alongside the plants as if they were, despite the elaborate and inventive processes, of the same family. (A conceit, of course: Art is always artificial. But conceit, and dream of escaping the bonds of artifice, has persistently motivated a certain kind of artist).

Sometimes the origins of the work are outside the studio, in field or garden. “Dark Protean” started with drawings of different Protea plants, that evergreen shrub with leathery, sawtooth leaves that behave with unusual irregularity of structure. But it took on a protean and richly complex life in the studio, with representation slipping into gestural rhythm at the particularity of splash and surface mark coexisting or sliding into a deep in illusionistic, floating space. This took place over several months. There is a suggestion of emotional turmoil. Ambiguity overrides an easy reading and we are left admiring work that incorporates both the speed of paint application and slow gestation.

Recently, beginning with the magnificent “Bromeliad under Shadow” of ‘92, the energetic activity of substance has given way to images of still greater ambiguity and increased economy. The layering is still there but it takes place through liquidity and the use of wash, or the application of graphite dust in the drawings and pigment the paintings on the surface that has been drawn with water. Substance settles gently on liquid decision-making. There is a suggestion of stencilling, or a preconceived line, at work. The washes are still manipulated, accumulating and dissolving, and other areas of the painting, or drawing, disclose the early gestural excitement. There is a clarity of purpose that allows chance and decision to stand side-by-side, to intertwine and then separate again. It takes some nerve and agile intelligence to do this.

There is a strong evocation of classical Chinese painting and calligraphy. But that is secondary to those moments of observation and contemplation in the studio with a light from high windows glances across leaf forms, throwing shadows. Shadows, despite their pejorative status in Plato’s cave, are like whispered rumours of the object or distilled, soft-edge images of the real world. Davison does not take an easy option for a shadowy world. He is trying to honour both object and shadow, to take them apart, mix them up and reassemble them. In this process leaf and shadow and wall, figure and ground, surface and illusion are brought together; but, paradoxically, it is still deep emotionally charged space.

Michael Williams