Davida Allen

Davida has said she works in episodes.   This is through personal necessity, and because the life of the painting when wet, finishes quickly.   There is a very strict technical limitation to make any changes.   Whereas other methods of painting allow for changes to be made, Davida’s direct hands on caressing of the paint, the substance of light, cannot easily be reformed without destroying the image or its immediacy.   Throughout her life she has always worked with directness, her very earliest works were uncompromising.   The emotion she expressed in the series “Death of my Father” showed the journey of a soul in sorrow.   The actor paintings, the children, the housewife reflect an artist of great individuality, far from the dictates of fashion and popularity.   Her work is a reflection of her life.

If I may quote some of the things Davida has told me – There is no need or desire to make marks other than the most simple facts and so her work is as uncomplicated and diagrammatic as a child.   However in saying this, she is fully aware of the diagram or sign in other cultures; the Egyptians with two perspectives of a figure.   A figure walking “the eyes focus is contrary to the direction of the head.   In Aboriginal art the figures have specifically simple signs or diagrams for male and female —“   She says that her people are “abstract personalities – deliberately so that the figure is not a specific person”.   She allows room for an audience to imagine the figures as universal.   To examine Davida’s images is to come into direct communion with her life.

The colours used show the world within, that is both the painter’s imagination and the world between this imagination and the felt reality of another parallel world.   That is the passion of the artist, to let that other possibility manifest itself in the work.   The viewer searches the work with no fixed expectations but with an openness to the other world revealed to us.

William Robinson (2008) / Text: Philip Bacon Galleries