Description
Signed and inscribed with title and dated 2007 verso, oil on canvas
Dimensions
76cm x 96cm (30in x 37.75in)
Footnote
Note: Alan Davie was born in Grangemouth, Scotland in 1920. His father was a schoolmaster and amateur painter and Alan studied at Edinburgh College of Art in the late 1930s.
Jazz had always played an important part in his life and having served with the army in WWII, in 1947 Davie worked as a full time jazz saxophonist and at the same time started to make jewellery, write poetry and design textiles. The following year, now married, he began to travel, visiting Venice, where he was intrigued by the work of Pollock and De Kooning, in the Guggenheim collection. Inspired to start painting again, Davie painted several pictures on rolls of cheap paper in his hotel room. Two were immediately bought by Peggy Guggenheim, who also introduced him to London gallery Gimpel Fils.
American abstract expressionism, married with an interest in African art and the influence of Picasso and Klee, formed the roots of Davie's work throughout the 1950s. From the mid fifties an interest in Zen Buddhism and oriental mysticism added further nuances, along with further exposure to the Americans at the time of his first show in New York in 1956.
Largely ignored at this time in his homeland, Davie began to sell overseas and finally elevated from poverty, bought a house in Cornwall where he mingled with a number of St Ives artists.
From the 1960s Davie maintained that his work, despite its appearance, was not abstract but consisted of emotive common symbols, which spoke directly to the viewer. His role, he insisted was that of a 'shaman', acting as a link between the viewer and the intractable. Taking his cue from the Surrealists, his method was an essentially spontaneous, almost automatic, attempt to unlock the unconscious.
Davie's work contains numerous overlapping references to magic, religion and primitive art, in particularly that of the Navajo, Carib, Australian Aborigine, ancient Egyptian, Celt and Pict.
This very late painting, Insignias for the Little White Horse, is typical of his mature work. Against a monochrome blue ground, itself suggestive of the spiritual, animals and objects float suspended. Among these, the white horse of the title, the bird and the snake, all resonate with ancient significance in tribal art.
While it is tempting to interpret the central motif as an open mouth, as ever with Davie, the moment that one attempts to decipher his hieroglyphs, multiple other meanings become evident.
In his later years Davie received many plaudits. His CBE in 1972 was followed by retrospectives in London and New York in 1993, Chicago in 1994 and Edinburgh in 2000 and a major show at Tate Britain in April 2014, the month of his death.