Alan Davie: Cosmic Signals 5

About the artist

Alan Davie RA CBE (1920-2014)

Alan Davie was a Scottish born painter and jazz musician who enjoyed an international career for his genre defying works.   In 1948 he saw the work of the American Abstract Expressionists and was impressed by their intensity and freedom. He abandoned traditional methods of composition and subject matter and sought to free his art from premeditated decision-making. This approach owes much to the artist's interest in Zen Buddhism and there is also an analogy with jazz - Davie was a jazz saxophonist early on in his career. In the later 1950s and 1960s his brushwork became more controlled and the imagery more legible. Mysterious symbols began to appear, found in sources as varied as American Indian pottery, maps, ancient rock-carvings and Aboriginal art.  By his own reckoning, he was painter, poet, jazz musician and jewellery designer. His admirers also had him down as a shaman and a maker of magic, which did not displease him.  Davie maintained that the ego was the enemy of true art, which must come from the deep wellsprings of culture and the flow of the Jungian collective unconscious. He wanted, he said, to link up with the "mysterious and spiritual forces normally beyond our comprehension". His work is held in numerous international public and private collections.

Alan and Kip began working together in the late 1990s going on to produce over thirty editions together. Kip remembers Alan as a ‘good collaborator’ something he attributes to Alan being a jazz musician which ‘involves listening hard to others.’