Zen Mat No.1 by Alan Davie

A native of Grangemouth, Scotland, Alan Davie is celebrated for being one of the first post-war British artists to develop an expressive form of abstraction. His lively non-representational oil and watercolour paintings of the early 1950s bear similarities to the avant-garde works of the New York School. Davie travelled widely and in Venice became influenced by European and American painters of the period, including Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock and Joan Miró. During the later 1960s when a younger generation of British artists were embracing post-painterly abstraction, Davie’s art began to shift towards a revival of figuration, narrative and mythology. His paintings took on a new direction during the 1970s when the artist spent part of each year in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where he was inspired by a whole new culture, landscape and subject matter. Davie’s ever-evolving practice was underpinned by his idea that ‘Painting is a continuous process which has no beginning or end.’

Davie was also well-respected as a musician, playing the saxophone, piano, cello and bass clarinet. Following the Second World War he toured with an Edinburgh-based orchestra, as a tenor saxophonist. He revisited jazz music later in his career, which was a continual source in Davie’s search for ‘the mystery of life’.