Master of Mystery and Magic

by Patrick Elliot

Patrick Elliot, Senior Curator of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, places Davie’s screen-print in the context of over 60 years of vibrant creativity.

Written for Alan Davie's exhibition Screen Prints 7th December - 26th January 2002

There has never been a very clear distinction for Davie between drawing, painting and printmaking. They are all done in an intuitive, improvised manner, so that his hand is, as it were, working on its own and Davie watches what happens. He also uses the same tools for each practise, brushes rather than pens, pencils or special printmaking equipment. No one is more surprised and mystified by the results than the artist himself. The various different practices feed off each other so that an idea which surfaces through the process of drawing might then be brought into a print, or an image which comes about accidentally in a print, might then be reworked in the form of a large painting. So it is that some of the screen prints featured here follow on from paintings, while others inspired paintings. His art works in a cyclical way, and this process of cross-fertilisation between Davie’s various artistic activities is central to the work. Unlike many of his contemporaries, it would never occur to him to make a printed reproduction of a painting. Why would he want to when he has so many new ideas fizzing away in his head? In fact, there has never been a very clear distinction between any of the activities Davie has undertaken, whether it is playing the saxophone or piano, flying a glider, scuba diving, sailing a yacht, gardening or simply walking. Nothing stays still. Even when seated, you notice his fingers drumming away, as if he were making an invisible painting. Always dressed in electric colours, he is the living embodiment of his work, or his work is the embodiment of him, or probably both. Everything about him is a resounding affirmation of life. His first colour print, a screen-print called Yes of 1956, says it all.

Major campaign
Davie’s career stretches back more than sixty years, to some remarkably accomplished paintings and drawings made when he was a teenager in Edinburgh in the 1930s. His activities as a printmaker have been intermittent but concentrated. He made a series of monotypes and a couple of linocuts in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a number of colour lithographs in the mid-1960s and 1970s; and then relatively little apart from a portfolio of prints made in the late 1980s. Until 1999 nearly all his printmaking had been confined to the medium of lithography. Then, at the age of eighty, he embarked upon a major campaign of screen-printing, working with the master printmaker Kip Gresham at Gresham Studio, near Cambridge. The thirty-two screen-print featured in this catalogue are the product of that continuing collaboration.

Briefly, screen-print are made by passing ink through a very fine mesh (originally silk, hence the term silkscreen, but synthetic meshes are used today) and on to a sheet of paper beneath. By masking certain areas of the mesh, ink passes through some parts, but not through the whole surface. It is like a sophisticated stencil. For these screen-print, Davie painted on to transparent polyester sheets, using a separate sheet for each colour. These brush drawing s were then transposed on to the screens, in negative form, and when ink is passed through them it produces a printed version of the drawing on the paper. If a print has two colours, it has been made with two separate screens; if it has ten, it has been made with ten screens. Multiple copies of each print can be made: most of these screen-print were made in editions of thirty.

Printmaking at its best
Gresham is renowned for his ability to tease extra nuances out of each colour, and working with Davie he has pushed this process as far and as skilfully as any other print studio. So it is that some of the colours in Davie’s drawings are rendered in several subtly modulated tones, so that instead of printing, say, a flat red colour, three reds of slightly different intensity are layered over each other. The printed images are full of incredible marbling effects, and we can even distinguish marks which have been made with a well-loaded brush and others where the colour scarcely registers at all. Splattered ink and finger marks also appear, telling of the immediacy of the process. This is printmaking at its best, but happily none of the technical sophistication intrudes upon Davie’s prints. It is his artistry which is to the fore, not the means of manufacture. The prints seem to have more to do with ancient civilisations than with twenty-first-century technology.

Davie has pioneered improvisation in printmaking. Even in the early 1960s, the conventional approach in colour printmaking was for an artist to make a preparatory study in watercolour or gouache, and then make a lithographic variant or copy. This was essentially a reproductive process, aimed at making something similar, or identical, to the preparatory work. When he was asked to make some prints in 1960, Davie at first refused: ‘For me’, he wrote, ‘it would not be satisfactory to do designs for lithographs…the design should in fact be something which we should arrive at in the end.’ He felt that any work of art print, painting, gouache should be arrived at spontaneously, and that it had to be a creative process, not a reproductive one. With some misgivings, in 1964 he agreed to make a series of lithographs, and while he did make a preparatory study, produced a welter of different versions of an image which he called Celtic Dreamboat (Davie always finds the title after the work is finished). They were done in different colours and layers, some with the image printed upside-down or back-to front. This experimental approach, in which every angle is tried, is Davie’s preferred method. He works closely with the printers, inviting them to try out different colours and combinations and involving them in the collaborative process. This quest for improvisation can be likened to jazz music. Davie had played alto saxophone professionally after the war. Later in 1965 Davie made another set of prints, this time in Switzerland: the famous Zurich Improvisations. Davie recalls that when he arrived at the studio in Zurich, the printers were dumbfounded that he had made no preparatory sketches. Instead he simply painted on the lithographic plates and got the printers to layer them in different combinations and different colours. Soon he had taken over the whole studio with its six presses, and by the end had produced thirty-four magnificent lithographs. This inventive, collaborative approach was completely new, and that series stands as a landmark in twentieth-century printmaking.

A new venture
Davie began his association with Gresham Studio in the autumn of 1999. the Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, had decided to commission a portfolio of prints by ten leading artists, and asked Gresham to advise on the project and produce the set. Gresham had admired Davie’s work for many years, and nominated him as one of the artists. Davie had of course made plenty of lithographs, but these had mainly been done thirty years earlier or more. And his experience with screen-printing was pretty limited. That early screen-print, Yes, was a rudimentary work made at a friend’s house with a piece of silk stretched over a wooden frame. After that, his only major screen-print was Magic Circles 1989, co-commissioned by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, for display on the main platform of Haymarket railway station in Edinburgh. While a painter can change colours at will and can see the progress immediately, most printing techniques require a leap of imagination, in that the artist only sees what he has done once the technicians have rolled the print through the presses. It is this greater complexity of construction that makes printmaking less conducive to invention and improvisation, or at least seem so. Some artists find it a difficult step, moving from the privacy of the painting studio, where assistants are at their beck-and-call, and the printing machinery stands there humming, waiting for work to do. Some find it difficult to imagine how the layers of colour will appear when printed on top of each other.

With a certain diffidence, Davie nevertheless agreed to the project. For this first work, Incantation, he decided to follow a gouache fairly closely. Screen-printing is usually associated with flat colour and with emblematic, poster-like imagery: think, for example of the screen prints of Warhol, Lichtenstein, Caulfield and Paolozzi. It is a technique which is less often associated with painterly effects, but with care and the right approach, screen prints can capture all the immediacy of the artist’s touch. The Incantation print carries beautiful watercolour qualities in the sandy-coloured ground thanks to several separate printings of marginally different sand colours. In all, eighteen different screens were used for the print. We can see the way in which the deep colour has collected in pools, encircled by thinner, lighter washes. Not surprisingly, Davie was somewhat astonished by the sensitivity and richness of the medium: these kinds of results had not been possible in the sixties, when he began printmaking.

Creative collaboration
Warming to the process of screen-printing, and to the creative nature of the collaboration, Davie made several other prints. Blue Incantation is a variant of Incantation. It was inspired by the actual screen mesh used for making Incantation, and which, for reasons to do with the process of production, was coloured blue and gold. Davie made a new print, Island Fantasy, which responds to medieval maps, and was commissioned by the Pier Art Centre in Stromness, Orkney. Bird Variation I, Variation on Letter R, and Kip’s Horse Variation I, made at the same time in 1999, are variations on brush-drawings made by Davie in the mid-1950s. Whilst the two commissioned prints are based on gouache paintings (though they do not follow them exactly), the others are more experimental and spontaneous. In the three ‘variation’ prints, the black was printed first, and overlaid with a semi-transparent oatmeal colour, which allows the black to show through. Torn paper was laid over elements of the paper and further oatmeal screens printed on top. This novel technique has been a feature of quite an umber of the prints Davie has made at Gresham Studio, torn pieces of paper preventing the ink from printing onto the sheet, thereby creating a sense of depth. It is a bit like collage but in reverse. The same approach can be seen, for example, in Ra Drak (Variation II), in some of the Bull’s Moon variations and in 5 Cosmic Signals Nos. 4 and 5.

The three Tresor Fone variations and the four Bull’s Moon variations were generated in a similar way to the prints of the 1960s in that they share the same key image, printed from the same screen, but each variant has additional screen and colour combinations. In fact, most of Davie’s prints are generated in this way. Any one of the prints produces by the Gresham Studio will have numerous variants, though these will not be published and are mainly discarded. Sometimes it is a case of printing the black first, and laying colour over it; sometimes the black is printed last for greater emphasis. Sometimes a colour is printed twice to achieve greater force. It is a continual, experimental journey, which feeds off the printing process and the expertise of the printer. Through this process of experimentation, trial and error, and testing, Davie feels his way along until he finds the image to his satisfaction. In this way, it is not the case that he begins with a specific image in mind, or that he even has an idea of how many prints he might make: rather he finds the image through the printmaking process. Some of the prints have inspired paintings: the Tresor Fone prints were subsequently made as very large oil paintings; others, such as the Cosmic Signals prints, are closer in spirit to Davie’s gouaches, which are tightly worked. Whatever the case, the prints contain the hallmarks which have lain at the heart of his art for sixty years: thundering colour, muscular calligraphy matched with delicacy of drawing, and mysterious symbolism. Davie, at the grand age of eighty, had taken to screen-printing like a duck to water. With such a long career behind him, he is not afraid to experiment of to take risks, and this shows in the prints.

Symbols of mystery
Davie’s imagery is generated in a spontaneous way. Over his long career he has built up a dictionary of symbols and motifs. Gresham refers to it as ‘cerebral image bank’ – which populate his compositions. While his paintings of the 1950s are gestural and abstract, he gradually began to introduce archetypal symbols such as crosses, wheels, diamonds, snakes, crescent moons, alphabet letters and so on. Found in civilizations the world over, these symbols hinted at a common culture. Through his travels to the Caribbean where he and his wife Bili had a second home for many years to Aboriginal sites in Australia, to Venezuela and elsewhere, Davie was made constantly aware of the same kinds of symbols cropping up in different corners of the world. Sometimes the symbols carried specific meanings; of ten the meanings remained unknown. But rather than wishing to decode the symbols, it was their mystery that Davie found attractive. He has never used symbols as representations of specific ideas, but rather as indicators of richness and mystery, and also of course as pictorial elements. Placing them into landscape settings by the simple addition of a horizon line, he brings them alive, like a modern-day Shaman. Other visual references which he has drawn upon over the years include Indian art (particularly Jain manuscripts), Aboriginal art, American Indian imagery and Venezuelan petroglyphs.

Some of the prints contain writing. He began incorporating words into paintings into the 1950s, but did so increasingly from the late 1980s, when he started inserting words and passages from a particular Spanish-language book about ancient Carib rock carvings. He was drawn in particular to foreign phrases which he half understood, and to odd sections in the footnotes, which, with their scholarly page references and academic words, hint at reason and fact. The combinations work in suggestive and sometimes contradictory ways, inviting the reader to make connections between them. A number of Davie’s recent screen-print incorporate words in this way, and he has also invented words, simply delighting in their sound (perhaps inspired by Surrealist writings, early Chinese poetry and James Joyce). The various words and numbers in the Tresor Fone prints and in Sonick Sin serve simultaneously to bolster the imagery, yet also to deepen its mystery. It suggests that the imagery is not abstract but perhaps part of some unfathomable, ancient civilisation, the history of which has been lost.

Davie is often clubbed together with the Abstract Expressionists, but this slightly misses the point. He is a Surrealist at heart. Like the Surrealists he is drawn towards chance, the irrational and the unconscious. If the meaning of his work is elusive, that is precisely the intention. The world is a mysterious, magical place and it is in keeping that Davie’s pictures offer mysterious new worlds for the viewer to enter and travel within.

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