Alan Davie b.1920
Terrible Tom, 1961
oil on canvas
48 by 60 inches


Provenance
Gimpel Fils, London
G Regis Collection
New Art Centre, London
Private Collection, UK

Exhibited
San Fransisco Museum of Art, British Art Today, November 13^th - December 16^th 1962, cat no.21
Dallas Museum of Contemporary Arts, British Art Today, January 15^th - February 17^th 1963
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, British Art Today, March 7^th - April 7^th 1963

Literature
A Bowness, Alan Davie, London, 1967, cat no.363



Although chronologically Davie tends to be grouped with contemporary abstract artists such as Scott, Lanyon and Heron, there is a fundamental difference in their work. Whilst many of the leading figures of British painting in the post-1945 period based their work in the abstraction of reality, for Davie, his painting was much more akin to the surrealism of artists in the European tradition such as Klee.

In the mid 1950’s he started to become interested in both Zen Buddhism and Jungian psychology and found the emphasis on releasing the subconscious from the strictures of the everyday very appealing. At the time, Davie was teaching, first at the Central School of Art and from 1956-59 as Gregory Fellow at Leeds University and in his classes he encouraged his students to allow their art to grow in an unforced and relaxed way that released the creative process. In the paintings of the period we are thus faced with what can at first seem to be a bewildering variety of imagery and physical mark-making. The paint is brushed, scraped, splashed and dragged across the canvas to create works which seem to suggest so much yet leave the viewer with a sense that further discoveries are still to be made.