Francis Davison

Francis Davison was one of the most innovative and inventive artists to work in post-war England. He began as a poet but turned to painting in the 1940s before finding his true metier as a collagist in 1952. Self-taught but encouraged and nurtured by his second wife, the painter and sculptor Margaret Mellis, Davison invented a brand of paper collage using only found colour. Although he cut some of his materials to begin with, his speciality was to tear the paper and orchestrate the pieces in rhythmic abstract arrangements of shapes and divisions, which sometimes recall the turning and coiling of the human internal organs or the maze of the brain. The improvisatory nature of the work was important, but even more so the manner in which it transfigured its raw materials.