Peter Davey

I grew up in Barnstaple, North Devon, spending most of the time outdoors, in the fields, especially in the rain. Mysterious Exmoor was not far away, with its dangerous bogs and wind-flattened whortleberry bushes, and we'd often cycle to the sea and spend the day climbing rocks and searching for cowrie shells. I think my first ambition was to be a tramp in the mode of W. H. Davies, but I was also strongly attracted to la vie bohemienne as portrayed in novels about Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Van Gogh. I drew incessantly on every scrap of paper: Graham Sutherland-influenced landscapes with rotting trees and declining suns, my mum cleaning the grate, wild-looking characters in pubs, sometimes with flames above their heads after too much scrumpy, abandoned ploughs and tractors, tramps, labourers at London docks where I worked for a couple of weeks, religious converts at soup kitchens, moonlit misty roads in the middle of the night.

My first art school tutors, at Bideford, were not particularly encouraging about my way of working, and most unsuccessfully attempted to replace my romantic inclinations with "Basic Design": investigating the possibilities of points, lines, planes, concepts, colour charts, organic life (pine cones), in other words, the grammar of visual communication divorced from any kind of personal involvement. I studied Fine Art at Reading University and Chelsea School of Art. It was a really thrilling time, and my work became professional, impersonal, ironic, and about art. Years passed and I had my first one man show at Garage in London:  8ft square trompe l'oeil paintings of marble and woodgrain. Nothing personal there but the paintings seem to me as obviously by the same hand as that of the painter of flaming heads and farmyards of 10 years earlier - an infatuation with texture and transparency and chaotic detail.

RECENT WORK

The themes are personal: feelings of exhilaration, usually on holiday abroad, the response rapidly notated in a sketchbook using pen, oil pastel and watercolour. I make paintings based on these sketches later in the studio. I no longer paint from observation, but from recall and reconstruction. What's important is to produce the feeling of being in that place, and this I gradually achieve by constantly re-drawing over the drying layers of oil paint in charcoal, and scraping off every paint mark that does not feel right. Usually the paintings take 3-4 months. Eventually I have constructed something I can believe in.