David Davies: Process

"St. Ives" by David Davies

"Ordinary sized pictures David Davies generally painted on the spot, but when he had a large canvas in mind he would first make a small painting, on which, as he worked, he mentally, as well as by brush stroke, registered the points which he reckoned it would be necessary in the bigger picture contemplated, to stress. Nocturnes, or fleeting impressions, he would memorize, supplying any deficiency of memory from his store of accumulated knowledge. His practice, in such cases, was to gaze hard at his subject and deliberately concentrate on its graphic features with reference to the practical handling and perpetuation of them. He never troubled with the artistic outcome, but let his subconscious deal with that side of the question.

His taste governed his choice in selecting a motif; therefore, his subjects were always those brief states in which nature chants the gloria and exalts us momentarily to a disregard of the restraints of time and space. The reception of such brief intimations is vouchsafed to all men, but the man who can recapture these disclosures and record them is a rare man - one of the rarest of men - and David Davies is that kind of man.

Fine as his pictures may be as presentments of certain terrestrial aspects of nature, they are yet finer as symbols of the larger nature of which our earth and sea and sky are but a part; nature immanent,* limitless, everlasting...

*Immanent (adjective): Something that is naturally present, inherent, or existing within something else (often used in philosophy to describe something that remains completely within the mind). 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Art & Life of David Davies" by James MacDonald.)