Leigh Davis: Pushing Boundaries
Leigh Davis looks carefully at one of his newest, largest, and surely most accomplished paintings to date. Taking pride of place in his airy Staffordshire studio on a glorious summer’s day is Boats at Newlyn, a magnificent combination of form, colour and intricate surface texture. There is a hint of sparkling Cornish light, of vessel-like shapes, of guy ropes.
Yet invitations to formulate literal explanations of Davis’s work have become less and less frequent. This new exhibition, Pushing Boundaries, completes his journey into abstraction; it is an assured, expressive series of paintings and sculptures which confirm Davis’s position as one of the finest abstract artists working in Britain today.
It’s telling that when one asks Davis the significance – or indeed the meaning – of Boats at Newlyn (cat 24), his response is not immediately revealed via words or explanations. Davis is more concerned with action, feeling, and emotion. He instinctively grabs his sketch book and starts drawing.
“So look at this shape,” he says of an intriguing elliptical form on which he begins to work. “Straight away I know that it needs something else on the other side to offer both tension and a relationship. Then I start building up the layers from that initial structure – there might be some cross-hatching here, for example – and very quickly I can feel the energy, purpose and form of a piece I’m working on.”
It’s a remarkable insight into the distinctive style that has become common to all Davis’s work, as he has gradually moved away from reflections on specific places, landscapes and structures. Some of the titles might nod to the Isles of Scilly (the arresting vibrancy of Lichen Yellow Form (cat 2))
or to the Cornish coast (the beautifully balanced Three Boats, Cape Cornwall (cat 30)), but where Davis once would take pictures or sketches of these places and use them as reference points, now the motivations are all instinctive.
This refinement and deepening of his abstraction is hugely exciting. In the initial phases of a work, Davis operates quickly, often using compressed oil paint to draw and mark in the linear structure. A pallet knife might come next, or a chisel. In Erosion and Division (cat 16), there was another layer to the process, as he allowed the proportions of two applied boards to direct the work.
“I was constantly thinking about the relationship of these forms with one another,” he says of Erosion and Division. “The way that they could relate and how colour and shape could operate on a plane that had to be broken across the two boards created an obvious tension.”
“But more and more I found any thought processes weren’t an internal dialogue but subsumed into feeling.”
The circular shape which is a recurring motif in Davis’s work is split in half in Erosion and Division. It’s a powerful, thoughtprovoking expression of the destructive power of nature hinted at in the title.
“I do have a fascination with circles and particularly the placement of circles in composition,” Davis agrees, gesturing at Process of Reclamation (cat 5). Here the tight circle is a moment of fixed surety in a piece fizzing with organic, wild energy.
“It’s a subconscious thing – I’m not thinking, I must put a circle in there. But then, the whole way I’ve been painting has
been a process of giving way to my subconscious. It’s relying more on memory and structure; I’m solely focused on scale, composition, colour, image. Constantly asking myself questions about how to respond to the previous mark, the previous colour, the previous shape. I liken the process to playing an instrument well enough to know your method instinctively.”
And if that’s a reference to jazz, then it makes perfect sense. Davis’s entire sensibility is like a confident expression of an improvised jazz riff, based entirely on feel but within a set of loose rules.
“It’s true that when I start sketching now, I know it’s going to work; I’m not just sketching for the sake of it,” he agrees.
“In the larger works though, there’s such a physicality to the process. And when I’m in that moment, that organic point of artistic creation feels genuinely euphoric. You’re completely and utterly absorbed.”
Indeed, Davis was so excited by the potential for the larger, expansive works to have these arresting, expressive moments and details both for artist and viewer – the vivid orange in St Martin’s (cat 9) being a particular case in point – that he felt the need to “work up” to them. Not that this means the smaller works are somehow less important. Quite the opposite; the loose fluidity and textures of Lichen Yellow Form (cat 2)or Fractured Granite Form, St Mary’s (cat 14) are Leigh Davis at his best, incredibly intense bursts of painting which act as signposts to his bigger works.
This is, perhaps, why Pushing Boundaries feels like such an apt and layered title for this collection of work. Not only has Davis pushed back from the boundaries that more literal
representations of landscapes or structures impose, he’s also challenged himself to develop from 2021’s Further into Abstraction series something even more fluid and energetic.
“As an artist, you obviously want people to understand your style, to find a connection and a thread through it all,” he admits. “But it’s also a constant process of refining and gradually evolving what you do.”
That observation applies to Davis’s sculpture, too. The five pieces here might bear some resemblance to his previous work – particularly the more architectural forms of Bryher Boat (cat 3) and Cornubian Form (cat 6) – but the relationship
between his painting and sculpture has evolved. Where initially the paintings and sculptures in a series had specific relationships to each other, now the only similarity is in style.
“Whatever medium I’m working in, the idea of composition, colour and surface texture remains the same,” he says. “So I might remember running my hand over a piece of coarse, gritty, grainy stone in the Isles of Scilly; those elements stay in my mind to the extent that when I’m working on the surface texture, I’ll mix sawdust into the paint. But then I might also scrape, scar and scratch into the layers too – you get this real vibration and tension in the application.”
“It’s exactly the same with sculpture, except in three dimensions and using a different source material; you’re constantly working on the surface texture, using similar tools to create these little details.”
As with his painting, Davis is fascinated with how separate forms in sculpture interact. This is most obviously apparent in Sea Stacks I & II (cat 11 and 23), where the two components
hinting at the logan stone rock stacks of the South West seem to be in dialogue with one another. It’s instructive, too, that not all his sculptural work is now begun with a maquette
– a decision that Davis says allows him to work more spontaneously and to constantly refine, carve, and work with the tensions of negative spaces.
Whether it’s rock-like forms or blasts of vivid oils, intricate textures or sweeping blocks of colour, the common, golden thread in Davis’s work is a dynamic exploration of movement, energy and expression. Pushing boundaries, indeed.
From a conversation with Ben East
CATALOGUE 1
Enveloping Sea signed also signed, titled and dated 2022 verso oil on board
20 x 40 cms (8 x 16 ins) framed: 32 x 52 cms (13 x 21 ins)
CATALOGUE 2
Lichen Yellow Form, Bryher signed also signed, titled and dated 2022 verso oil on linen laid on panel 22 x 40 cms (9 x 16 ins) framed: 34 x 52 cms (14 x 21 ins)
CATALOGUE 3 Bryher Boat stamped with initials number 1 from edition of 7 cast in 2022 bronze on copper base 18 x 31 cms (7 x 12 ins)
CATALOGUE 4
Headland Form signed also signed, titled and dated 2022 verso oil on linen laid on panel 30 x 60 cms (12 x 24 ins) framed: 44 x 74 cms (17 x 29 ins)
