.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Although Davie studied art at Edinburgh, he initially embarked on his creative life as a poet, influenced by Pound and Whitman, before focusing his attention on a career as a jazz musician, playing the saxophone. It was during a European tour in 1948 that he decided he should concentrate his creative energies on painting instead.
Davie's influences vary from Oriental mysticism to Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, whose work he saw in Peggy Guggenheim's collection. Although Davie shared a similar painting technique with Pollock of working on a large scale on the floor, rather than on an easel or wall, and using paint from pots rather than tubes, Davie has stressed the difference between their work, saying in 1993, 'I wasn't imitating Pollock. The aim in the end was to produce a work of art with sheer exuberance and to work fast on the canvas. To do that you had to use liquid paint and for that you had to work on the floor' (quoted from an interview with Iain Gale, 'Tales of man, myth and magic', The Independent, 18 May 1993).
For Davie painting is a mystical experience and he sees it as, 'fundamentally the same as artists of remote times ... engaged in a shamanistic conjuring up of visions which will link us metaphorically with mysterious and spiritual forces normally beyond our apprehension' (see exhibition catalogue, Alan Davie: Schilderijen Paintings, 1950-2000, Amstelveen, The Cobra Museum of Modern Art, 1989, p. 13).
Davie's influences vary from Oriental mysticism to Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, whose work he saw in Peggy Guggenheim's collection. Although Davie shared a similar painting technique with Pollock of working on a large scale on the floor, rather than on an easel or wall, and using paint from pots rather than tubes, Davie has stressed the difference between their work, saying in 1993, 'I wasn't imitating Pollock. The aim in the end was to produce a work of art with sheer exuberance and to work fast on the canvas. To do that you had to use liquid paint and for that you had to work on the floor' (quoted from an interview with Iain Gale, 'Tales of man, myth and magic', The Independent, 18 May 1993).
For Davie painting is a mystical experience and he sees it as, 'fundamentally the same as artists of remote times ... engaged in a shamanistic conjuring up of visions which will link us metaphorically with mysterious and spiritual forces normally beyond our apprehension' (see exhibition catalogue, Alan Davie: Schilderijen Paintings, 1950-2000, Amstelveen, The Cobra Museum of Modern Art, 1989, p. 13).