This is the first major study of the life and art of London born painter and collagist Francis Davison (1919-1984). After reading English and Anthropology at Cambridge, he wrote poetry, and took up drawing in 1946. By the early 1950s Davison's paintings had became simplified shapes and it was not long before he ceased painting in favour of working in collage. Over the next 20 years reference to landscape disappeared and the colour range was extended. Davison relied entirely on found, used and unpainted papers, which were cut and fitted with great exactitude. By the end of his Life he had developed a method of tearing paper that gave him complete mastery over his material.
Excerpts from Francis Davison by Andrew Lambirth
'Davison's early collage work tended to be subdued in colour, simply because the paper that was available did not come in striking colours. Later this changed. He also tended at this point to fill his compositions to the edge of the given rectangle (a section of Essex board), and used the edge significantly. Later he created a much more open-weave approach with no backboard and an edge that meandered independently.
The 1960s saw him exploring optical relationships as the range of coloured paper available to him opened up with new habits of packaging and eye-catching branding. The earliest collages, with their mixture of torn and cut paper, the straight cut edges alternating with uneven torn ones, and triangular forms proliferating, seem to recall one or two of Mellis's 1940 works: for example, Construction in Wood and Collage with Red Triangle. But as Davison began to explore his new language, the similarities vanished, and he was out on his own, orchestrating wedges and slabs of black against grey or brown, or adding a segment of dusky pink to a meeting of rough boat shapes in blue-green, brown and black. Forests of verticals read like medieval strip farming, but with the loss of the Essex board backing, an initially denser configuration of elements takes over. The paper is layered and overlapped to keep the collage together.
The work that Davison made between 1971 and 1973 has a particular character to it. Lines and blocks of strong colour are combined and overlaid, but air is also allowed in for the first time, and gaps between the elements appear, bringing the concept of blankness, or negative space, into the work. There is, therefore, an unusual degree of transparency to these works.
A couple of years after Davison's death, the young Damien Hirst sought him out and discovered instead his widow, Margaret Mellis. Hirst, a student from Leeds, had been seriously struck by Davison's Hayward exhibition and modelled his own work for the next year or two on the collages he so admired. (They 'blew me away', he said later.) Davison rather than Schwitters (as so often reported) is the guiding inspiration behind Hirst's work of this period'.
