Skip to navigation | Skip to search
RA Magazine talks to Joe TIlson RA
Photograph by Eamonn McCabe.
RA Magazine talks to Chris Wilkinson RA
Photograph by Julian Anderson.
RA Magazine talks to Peter Cook RA
Photograph by Eamonn McCabe.
RA Magazine talks to Richard Wilson RA
Photograph by Julian Anderson.
Name: James Alan Davie RA
Born: 1920
Elected RA: 2012
Category of Membership: Painter
Alan Davie, 'opus O.405 Catch the Bird', 1961. oil on canvas. 60 x 48 in/152.4 x 121.9 cm.
James Alan Davie is a Scottish painter and printmaker. He trained at Edinburgh College of Art from 1938-40 and as a young man wrote poetry and played the tenor saxophone in the highly regarded Tommy Sampson Orchestra.
Inspired by the American Abstract Expressionists, Surrealists and the Cobra Group, he developed his own unique form of expression combining mythic imagery, enigmatic symbols and, later, taking inspiration from African and Oceanic Art as well as Zen Buddhism.
Now in his early nineties, he continues to produce paintings of startling originality and vitality. Combining imagery derived from different cultures with a love of music and language, his paintings are a complex celebration of creativity
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art held a retrospective exhibition in 2000. More recently, in 2003-2004, the Tate St. Ives exhibition Jingling Space celebrated Davie's significant contribution to painting.
Recent solo exhibitions
2012 Gimpel Fils, London
2010 Gimpel Fils, London
2008 Gimpel Fils, London
James Hyman, London
Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin
Galerie Gimpel & Muller, Paris
2007 Thomas Dane, London
2006 108 Fine Art, Harrogate
2005 Gimpel Fils, London
Galleria Morone, Milan
2004 ACA Galleries, New York
Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh
Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster University
2003-04 Tate St. Ives, Cornwall
2003 Gimpel Fils, London
James Hyman, London
2002 Howard Gardens Gallery, University of Wales Institute
Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate
2001 MAC Birmingham
2000 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
