Alan Davie invariably gave titles to his paintings after they were finished, often adding a playful association to his work. In this case the title Lush Life is not only appropriate for an exuberant, richly coloured picture but could equally well be applied to the artist’s long and successful career. Davie was prolific across a wide range of activities, and whether it was making a painting, playing music, writing poetry or piloting a glider, he embraced the richness of life with seemingly unbounded vigour and enthusiasm.
Davie was born in Scotland and trained at Edinburgh College of Art. Although he left his native country permanently in 1948, there is a sense in which his feeling for the expressive power of colour and brushwork remained rooted in a Scottish tradition that stretches back to the nineteenth century and to artists like William McTaggart (see no.34). After serving as a gunner in the Second World War and a spell working as a jazz musician, Davie travelled widely in Europe in 1948–9. He was impressed by Surrealism and the work of artists such as Miró, Ernst and Klee, but a chance encounter in Venice with the American collector Peggy Guggenheim was a breakthrough. Guggenheim bought some of his work, introduced him to art dealers in London and encouraged his interest in recent American art including the early work of Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists.
Nurtured by his love of jazz and encouraged by the methods of Surrealism, Davie developed a fluid, improvisatory form of abstraction that quickly won international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s. His approach was impetuous and intuitive. From the early 1950s he began to lay his boards and canvases on the floor. Film footage taken by his wife Bili shows him attacking works such as Lush Life using his whole body to create dense webs of colour with increasingly gestural sweeps of paint. Through his study of ancient cultures and an interest in Zen Buddhism he came to see the role of the artist as a medium or shaman, conjuring up images and symbols that evoke deep and mysterious forces.
In Lush Life the large canvas is divided loosely into three vertical bands. A cluster of candy-coloured shapes seems to explode outwards from the centre of the composition. From close by, the mingling of bright colours and different textures is incredibly seductive, inviting our eyes to peer into layers of paint that have been dripped, splattered and smeared over the surface. The overall effect is joyful and spontaneous, radiating an almost childlike enjoyment in the creative act. In an interview towards the end of his life, Davie described his art as ‘an urge, an intensity, a kind of sexual need … I don’t practise painting or drawing as an art, in the sense of artifice, of making an imitation of something. It’s something I do from an inner compulsion, that has to come out.’
This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.