Fruity Tooty

Alan Davie was a Scottish painter and musician. Davie’s artwork is distinctive in its improvisational quality, gained from his own jazz style of free improvisation, musical collaborations and friendships. This also connects to his interest in the spontaneity of Zen, which teaches that the spiritual path is incompatible with planning ahead. By working as automatically as possible, Davie’s work has clear associations with the Abstract Expressionist movement in the States, in particular, his painting methods have been closely related to Jackson Pollock. In the later 1950s and 1960s his brushwork became more controlled and the imagery more legible. Mysterious symbols began to appear, found in sources as varied as Native American pottery, maps, ancient rock-carvings and Aboriginal art.