In 1948 Alan Davie saw the work of Jackson Pollock at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. This followed a year of travelling in Europe on a scholarship which also took in visits to Pompeii , Zurich and Paris. Despite the artist's enthusiasm for and affinity with Pollock's energy and gestural mark-making, his paintings in the following few years did not directly take up such methods. His canvases did however become larger and his surfaces had a richness and amplitude brought about by his ability, like Pollock, to paint an all-over liveliness.
Davie's paintings from the very early fifties are a rather sombre series which persistently suggest the corners of imaginary rooms. The walls are composed of enigmatic boxes and screens which look like apparatus for recording and controlling events taking place elsewhere, and he would seem to have woven an interest in science fiction into a highly personal sense of being on the threshold of unknown territory. He is perhaps here concerned with a problem of space which arises because he has a preconceived effect in mind. It is evident that he is keen to preserve the picture plane, but it is equally evident that he has created a moderate illusion of depth from which has arisen the atmosphere of premonition. This group of paintings now look like a series of sealed anterooms to his boundless inner sanctum.
At this point in his career Davie's painting could have gone quite logically in two or three different directions. These corners of rooms would have made superb settings for scarifying personnages in the manner of Francis Bacon or Graham Sutherland. On the other hand, Davie could have moved over into the 'flat space' of the Americans, agitating the picture surface with an abstract writing like Pollock, or covering it with sheets of colour as Rothko had done. Instead he took none of the paths which might have been predicted by the work of his peers. His canvases became swarming grounds for signs and symbols, the first of which - the diamond, the angry 'C' form - had first appeared in these brooding early interiors, in the guise of objects hanging undemonstatively from the walls. His later work apears much more impulsively executed as Davie's own private associations with these images and symbols came to drive his work. Towards the end of the fifties his palette was to become much broader and brighter than the muted colours seen here, and the compositional elements became increasingly discordant, more aesthetically comparable to Davie's other great passion: jazz music.
Adapted from an article by Robert Melville, which appeared in the journal Motif 7.