Discovery of the Staff

The Scottish artist Alan Davie was influenced by Abstract Expressionism, a style developed in America in which paint was splashed rapidly over large canvasses. The result was a random, expressive and often colourful abstract pattern. Making use of accident and chance composition in this manner, Davie built up images which, rather than having specific meaning, are suggestive of many things. Davie is a talented jazz musician, and the spontaneous improvisation of jazz music, together with its rhythms, is carried over in his style of painting. His fascination with colour, and with such themes as mythology, birth, magic and primitive African art emerge subconsciously as he paints. Discovery of the Staff, which Davie titled after the picture was completed, is named from the white hook-shaped object in the centre of it. The painting is full of strange signs and strong shapes which have no precise meaning, but which still have the fascination of a kind of writing or symbolism which we can half understand.