Curriculum Vitae

P h i l i p D a v i e s

Q U O T E S A N D C U R R I C U L U M V I T A E

'Like the great masters of this tradition, Poussin, Ingres and Picasso, Davies is a skilful exponent of pictorial theatre. In fact, he describes his practice as that of someone who writes the play, directs the actors, designs and makes the props and lights the stage, a highly unusual definition of painting, but entirely appropriate as Davies is an unusual painter. He believes that mystery can be a potent force in a painted image, that the sense of a painting should emerge slowly. He believes that paintings should have undercurrents as well as surface currents. He believes in ambiguity and in the tension generated by opposites.

His paintings, based on these beliefs and located within a largely disregarded tradition seem therefore to exist out of time and outside contemporary orthodoxy with its reliance, all too often, on volume, in the sense of visual decibels and on the immediacy of the sight bite. The Shock of the New is a compromised tradition that does not interest Phil Davies whose paintings are out on a subversive and quietly shocking limb.'

Peter Wheeler ( from 'The Craft of the Seducer' )
Vice Principal
Loughborough College of Art and Design

' In this series of paintings Phil Davies has created a microcosm of the world suspended in time in which actors construct tableaux from life in a world parallel to our own which is both familiar and enigmatic. Who are these people? Why do they disturb us ? What do they tell us about ourselves ? '

Kit Allsopp
Professor of Architecture
Manchester University

' Philip Davies places his figures in flimsy, impermanent spaces, like stage sets. The action is never quite clear - the artificiality reduces implied violence to play acting, but at the same time those odd, half-real spaces suggest an unstable, not quite controllable world.

There is a certainty to Davies' painting, a firmness in his modelling of form, which, taken with his dark consistent palette, promises an objective, even a reassuringly mundane art. Then again, there's something off key; or plangent (or perhaps just a little unhealthy) about those colours. It is this queasy matter-of-factness which gives Davies' work its presence - creating for us (with a distinctly cheerful malice) a dream world which is never quite odd enough to reassure us that we are not, in fact, awake. '

Charles Hall
Art for Sale
The Guardian