Looking at Peter Davis’ art, you enter a world of water and air in the control of a painter who lives with his inspirations all around him. He observes earth, wind, sea, and sky from the cliff heights and the high moorlands of his home in mainland Shetland, sketches and fills his mind’s notebooks, and then, taking stock in his studio, transposes the fragments of thoughts, ideas and memory into compositions on paper. He manipulates water suspensions of pigment across its absorbing white, drawing on years of learning and refining his methods, and creates pictures that show no obvious sign of the human hand. The works seem to appear as if by magic - colour spread capriciously with all kinds of visual effect - suggesting tempests crashing on headlands; gentle lapping of water on sheltered sand; extensive seascapes with distant rain squalls; stacks and cliffs in storm; high rounded hillsides under dark cloud; iced lochs in winter still; bright jewelled pools of colour in sunsplashed summer splay…

Hoolan (Skeldaness), Watercolour, bodycolur and chalk on paper 2021 (50x70cm)

Suggestion is central to his practice and the flow of ideas seems continuous, spilling from one picture to the next in such a way that if you want to enjoy his work fully you need to immerse yourself, and see his pictures in multiples. The images stand on their own, but they might best be seen as sections of a larger work – a set of Songs or Etudes.

Peter’s compositions can appear spontaneous, but are finely calibrated. He is architect, engineer, and painter. He is skilled in the chemistry and physics, he knows the harmonic and structural principles of combining colour on paper. His suspensions and his methods of employing them are tried and tested, and he makes his marks with purposeful intent and increasing confidence. With a strong base of skill and experience, he continually pushes his practice, he accepts risk and constantly employs elements of chance. After the pigment has been applied and manipulated, including subtle wet on wet additions or abstractions, and a range of physical moves, he watches what happens as it dries, how shapes and colours flow, how they spread on their own, and combine; and then resolves on what to to do next. His goals are to establish a balance between motion and stillness that gives himself and his viewers a sense of the beauty and atmosphere of the North, finding an equilibrium with a natural world in which beings play no part.

More than architect and engineer, Peter is, in a sense, a composer, but perhaps he is more so an arranger, and one who can work dynamically, responding to the vagaries of watercolour; coaxing, steering, and anticipating its actions. The natural world provides the visual and aural source material (we might see these as the melodies), and in processing it for his 50cm x 70cm format (and bigger options with his new studio), he is considering the main themes, the structure of the piece, the tone, the rhythm, and then how he will harmonise each note or colour. It’s a mix of planning and improvisation, but his appreciative audience understand the pleasures and the pitfalls of working in water. Peter likes directness and once he’s got an idea, his approach is bold. He’ll have absorbent material in constant use, but he can’t cover over marks he doesn’t like. He’s got to adapt or abort. In these circumstances understanding the medium, knowing how to control all the variables, having a deep knowledge of colour harmonies, the opportunities for bridging from one chromatic tone to another, the weight and momentum to apply at each point, is crucial to achieving a result.

Rolk, Watercolour, bodycolour and chalk on paper, 2022 (60x94cm)

What is he trying to achieve?

“I want to make something beautiful that I enjoy looking at myself. I want to respond to things I see outside. I want to create an atmosphere about the north, create something that suggests the northern noir. It's all to do with a certain sensibility. It's about darkness, about shadows, about the equal dark and light. It’s the north of Emil Nolde’s seas, his big heavy clouds, and Edvard Munch. I want to try to get that feeling in paintings.”

It’s also personal. It’s finding a meaning for himself. “It's something I have to do. If I don't paint or do something in the studio, I'm almost physically irritable. Not sick, not ill, but I'm on tenterhooks all the time. If I know I can paint and I've got something in my head I have to do or I want to do, I have to get there and do it. It's an addiction. I have to do it.”

Voe, Watercolour on paper 2022 (51x70cm)

What works for you – what’s in a finished Peter Davis painting?

“First of all, edges. Edges are the most important thing for me in paintings. I've always responded to landscape edges. Being in Orkney and Shetland where the trees are a lot less, you see the edges. Edges are far more important in the landscape. You haven't got that fuzzy tree. You've got a cleaner landscape, stripped back, and not a lot of elaboration. It's there and it falls into the sea. And you can see miles because of all of that.

I like to get a mood in the picture as well. If there's a stormy day that I'm inspired by, coming out of the rain, some heavy clouds, I'll want to try and create a mood, without depicting everything, without putting everything into it, of the weather that's outside – whether it’s the darkness or the sun breaking through. I want to express what I feel, and I can respond very violently to different weather (and seasons). If I see something happen outside – like a fabulous seascape – and I can put that into the picture I'm working on, I'll do it. If not, it goes into another picture a very short time afterwards. Often it's colour related, so if it’s the colour of the sea I see, that's the colour that will go into it the picture. I always have to respond to the light, but it’s particularly the sea now. The sea is constantly there out of my window, it's beautiful.”

The colours, the forms, the actions of air, water and land are central to every picture. However, whilst scenes are at the heart of the images, it’s the mood of the moment of which the scene is part that we’re looking at. There might be a single vision or focus, there may be multiple. Common to them all is the experience of being in wild places, where no living thing has a bearing on the world we’re sensing. There are no plants or creatures in Peter Davis paintings. There are no signs of human activity. All are rinsed out of his land, sea, and sky. He operates in geological time, before or after the anthropocene. It’s a crucial element in the picture’s appeal: a vision of an unpolluted world.

Peter lives in a valley by the sea in the west of mainland Shetland which until recently had just one resident: himself. Now he has a neighbour, but the view from his studio is devoid of human impact. There’s a simplicity to the landscape that constantly excites him, and he wants to show his viewers what he sees as the weather and the seasons create different effects and moods on almost a minute by minute basis.

What’s the process?

Sketchbooks (and day books for the everyday), photography, and memory are where the source material is stored from trips outdoors, and brought back to the studio where big windowed vistas offer constant reference material too.

The studio is Peter’s operating theatre. He can’t work unless he has all of the essential tools available to him, cleaned and prepared, and ready to be used.

“I've got a variety of brushes. There are basically three different brushes that I'm using. One's a squirrel brush (Series 333 Kazan) that goes that wide (gestures suggest significant width) but it comes to a beautiful point so you can do fine work, you’ve got control, and you can do big areas as well; another one is a similar squirrel brush but it's a bit smaller and again comes to a point; and there's a big thick bristle brush..

“The big bristle brush is for water. They can hold gallons. I use them purely for water. I don't use them for washes. Mainly because I find that they're too rough for a delicate wash. They scrape the paper a bit, so you get a line in the paper, because the bristle itself is just a little bit too hard. I use spray bottles. I don't use sponges, but I use kitchen roll. I use spray brushes with different colours, particularly white and grey and green, and that all helps to create nice fuzzy edges or a nice variable wash. For example, you can spray something into the wash and it will blend in. Those are the main things I use.. and pipettes for sucking up, because you get to the point where there’s a pool of water at the bottom of the paper. Being a control freak, I don't let that puddle run away, I sometimes just let it lie there, but as it drains down the puddle gets fuller and fuller, and sometimes I use pipettes to suck some of that, just so I can control how much is there. If I let it build up either it falls off and creates a mark on the paper that I don't want or it will create a very strong tide mark - a cauliflower or whatever - that I don't want at that point. It's just a control, to take out some of the pigment, some of the wash. Sometimes a brush can help with that too, but with a brush you've always got a risk. The pigment sinks down and you get an even layer of pigment beneath the water of the wash. You touch that and that mark is there for ever - the mark that you've made in the pigment layer underneath the water. You'll never get rid of it. And that's noticeable for me. I don't want that. It does my head in. I want purity. It’s the purity of the tone, not necessarily the purity of the wash. Sometimes I like to interrupt a wash and it does interesting things..”

Brim-skod, Clett, Watercolour, bodycolour and chalk on paper 2022 (50x70cm)

The pictures in progress are all stretched on to boards –“like a drum, very tight” - and taped down, where they can be for anything up to a week while the painting is worked on and completed. “I've got eight boards for my standard 50cm x 70cm size, three boards for the large size; I've got one board for a huge size of painting that I don't do very often, five foot by three foot. I've done one or two that size, but they're all rolled up in the studio.”

Underneath the boards are wedge shaped stones. Peter will manipulate the watercolour on the board by hand when he’s working, but he needs to apply different drying angles at different points. “Any tipping mechanism would need to have a universal joint because of the way I like to have it. It's just much easier for me to have a wedge shaped stone and have it on the table or bench and alter the angle; and sometimes it's off and there might be another stone because it's all about how much pigment I'm getting in the wash and that's crucial for the angle you've got it at. Sometimes it's great just to have it flat because you get totally different way of the wash drying.”

The final tools are the paint and the paper.

The transparency of watercolour is key to most of Peter’s paintings. The quality of the paper and the pigment is crucial. “It's good quality pigment for a start. In some of these pictures, I used some handmade paint, using a proprietary binder and grinding down the pigment, but mostly I use four different makes: Daniel Smith, Winsor and Newton, Rembrandt, and Horadam. Most of my pictures are Saunders Waterford paper. It's NOT surface. Some are on hot press, very smooth, but most are NOT surface.” (Note 1)

Once all the tools are in place, the paper stretched on the board, Peter might draw a tiny sketch on the tape in the corner of the picture as a compositional reference point. He could mark up halfs, thirds, quarters on the side of the paper; and he’ll have a space where he notes down the paint colours applied as a reminder when he returns to a picture after waiting for it to dry. Control and order are the basis of the extraordinary technique that he has taught himself, and which allow him to set about a blank paper with a boldness, directness and speed that amaze.

There are so many variables in watercolour painting. “The quality of the water. The quantity of water in the paint. What kind of water : hard or soft? The paper, how it dries, is it humid? Is it cold; is it hot? Temperature. The angles of the board: it’s all about getting the tilt right. You've got to be aware of what's going on with it all. It's not just one thing that you're doing. There are a lot of things going on at once.” And that’s before we consider timing. The point at which he “tickles” the wet edge to create a different effect, or the timing of his back-runs: lighter pigment being dropped into still wet darker paint..

Riv, Watercolour, bodycolour and chalk on paper 2022 (51x70cm)

What do the paintings look like?

They’re abstract land and seascapes, carefully created compositions packed with advanced colour harmonies and painting techniques that create mood, atmosphere, and effects that suggest at once evanescence and permanence. Peter captures the weather and the water as they play with geology. And he does it by playing with nature himself in the painting process, accepting what it brings, and always trying to take that as a positive.

The result is an experience that is fresh and on the edge. The viewer might feel the exposure Peter Davis feels, especially as he reaches the later stages of his journey. His constructs are fragile and easily disturbed. Clarity of thought, boldness and geological resolve are all there to see, as the full form takes shape. There’s little or no evidence of a brush end in Peter’s work. The pigment moves and dries through manipulation rather than pressure. Hard edged lines must be brushed, but the touch is so soft and the liquidity enough to avoid anything remotely suggesting the mark of a hair.

The purity of a note is a key element in a Peter Davis performance: his ensembles hold their breath across the bar lines, spreading the same tone and pitch across the paper when asked, and subtly easing back or pushing forward if required. Peter’s images beat too. The tempo is called straight away. Largo, adagio, andante, allegro…and his paint moves with the pressures he wants to apply: it sets a strong mood and tone for each piece.

Silence is a factor too. It’s part of the music in Davis’ work. There’s always the bare white paper somewhere in the finished picture, marking a place of rest. There’s nature’s noise in wind and water, and then there’s a place where humans can get away from that.

Equally, he creates, with ease, small shifts in colour and intensity that suggest shadows and reflections of clouds in water, and light and opacity in skies without any lined definition. These are modulations in tone that are, at first look, imperceptible, and then become central to the interpretation.

The weather outside, and inside Peter’s mind go hand in hand with the place he paints much of the time. Peter doesn’t go to Heilia Water, I imagine, when there’s a wild westerly. That’s one of his favourite places for flat calm. He doesn’t have to go far when the wind is up. Cliffs and stacks and churning seas are just a short walk away.

What defines a Peter Davis painting? Harmonies between adjacent and overlapping colour. Rhythm, that relies on edges - lines that can be firm, waved, graded, smudged, exploded, produced by nature through evaporation and absorption.. and then the melodies of nature in Shetland singing through.

Is he an architect and an engineer or a composer and arranger? “ I would say composer/arranger, because that's closer. I take the bits of the landscape I want – this bit of sky, that effect – and then I'll put them together and arrange them. Someone once said 'your paintings are so abstract', and I said 'They're only abstract if you use the word ‘abstraction’ in a linguistically proper way’. It’s not abstraction like Mondriaan, but taking elements out of the source and using them – ‘I quite like the colour there, take that out; I like the water, take that out, take this bit and that bit, and the form of the landscape’, not that it's necessarily anything like the scenes I've been inspired by. I'm not trying to represent. I'm re-presenting. I'm bringing these elements that I see and putting them together in my own way.”

"I like to extract lines from a landscape at a horizon or edge. I'm lucky in Shetland because we don't have trees or bushes. I don't have that interruption in the horizon. It's clean lines. This clean edge is great for abstracting things. It's difficult to abstract trees. Abstracting from the landscape is a matter of taking out colours, taking out shapes, taking out the lines that I want and I just re-arrange them in my own way on the paper. I like natural colour. I'm not one for bright blue skies that you see in some Scottish painting. I like to take out the edges. You'll see headlands. One of the nicest things I've got in the vision from the house is the smooth edge of the moorland/the hills going down to the rocky edges, the blooms of the cliffs, and then the sea. You've got that lovely smooth flow coming down, and that usually gets put into the work somewhere. I’m pulling elements out of the sketches and ideas I’ve got around me, and ‘recollecting in tranquillity’. It's all in my head.”

Here’s a couple of recent pictures

Heilia Water, frozen (2nd variant) Watercolour and bodycolour on paper, 2021 (51x70cm)

1. Heilia Water

“It was a cold day, everything was frozen. But piercing through the ice were rocks. That was my starting point. That was the bit taken out first. I knew I wanted the rocks in, but I left them aside, knowing I'm going to have to use them eventually. With the rest, the key take outs were the colours and the cold. I wanted to see if I could make the picture feel a little bit colder, while putting in the hills, and the fabulous sense of place. I had some photographs. I had what was going in my head, from memory. I had some drawings. I've got a little sketchbook that was just stuck in my trouser pocket and put some very simple lines in it, some very simple sketches. So I had all of those, came back, got a huge sheet of white paper, and the first thing I probably did on that was the water or the ice. I wanted to try to get a feeling of a frozen surface. In that surface I think I would have put gouache into it, a bit of spray. Basically, I set to work with some of these elements that I'd taken out of it.”

Do you try to set some kind of tone with the first mark?

“Not always, because sometimes it will be a sky, a sky that I've seen, or a tonal effect on the top half of the picture; other times, it might be tipping the palette out on the paper. Blue, obviously. Let it dry and take it from there. See where it goes. Especially with seas and storm. There's one particular one I did earlier in the year, because the sea was like that (suggests wildness).. an analogy would be chaos.. allow it to move around and then freeze it by letting it dry. So it's not just any one way.

I go back to it when it's dry and see where that's leading me. It might be straightforward. It might be that I can build on top of that, take out these bits that I want on it and plonk them in; or it might be that it hasn't worked very well, so I’ll just scrape away at it, or hosepipe it down a little bit, or spray, especially if it's quite intense pigment, it might need washing down a little bit.”

Scuddrie, Watercolour, bodycolour and chalk on paper, 2021 (50x70cm)

2. Scuddrie

This is "Scuddrie". "Scuddrie" is like bad weather, a bad day. This is one where I had lots of grey - Payne's Grey and Indigo - and that went down first, this colour here (points to a section in mid-right of the painting), and then I needed something below to be sand or a shoreline. That went in next, after the greys were dry. Then underneath, there's a faint line there, you can't see it very well, because I've tickled the edge of the grey as I was putting the lower half down, and that then trickles down, it makes a fainter line, so you don't just get such a harsh line, and here you've got a bit of it blended in. And then, I've got these stones in the studio that I can angle. Get it to a point and leave it to dry. This one then created a bloom at the bottom.

One bit at the top and then another bit at the bottom, and that's created a background to build upon. Then I’ve started adding in all these other colours and lines. This is about the bay below me, the shoreline, so these edges become very important. They're about part of the shoreline I can see. It's not abstract. It's actually a shore there.

Did the decision to make it into the shore come after you started the picture?

“No, it's there from the start. I’ve got a photographic reference. I try to avoid having the photograph in front of me whilst I’m painting. Sometimes it's inevitable because there's an effect in the photograph that I quite like, and I want some equivalent of it, but mainly the references I have out are a drawing or a sketch, or simply a few lines.

“ And that's one where I just dumped the palette on to the paper. I might have manipulated it a little with the brush to get it to suggest headlands or whatever.”

“Chalk is interesting, that's chalk in “Scuddrie”. Can you see there's an outline there? This picture didn’t work. It's about Clett, which is the big rock in the bay, a big skerry island. Clett was too dark. It was about heavy rain, and when you get heavy rain, you don't get delineation of landscape. I needed it fuzzy. So, the scrubbing brush came out - the nail brush in this case - and spray, and you can see where I've started brushing it away to get rid of that intense colour  - dark grey, or it might have even been black - and then once it was gone, I let it dry, and got the suggestion of rain, and then I wanted a suggestion of waves. So the chalk is simply there to provide a bit of contrast, a suggestion of rough sea.”

Peter is 69. He’s been an artist for forty years, but it only became his full time occupation in 2013, when he retired from art teaching at age 60. That was a pivotal moment for him. “I think I've grown up in the last ten years. The exhibition I had in 2013 in Shetland, was the defining exhibition for me. I could see the crossover between where I'd been and where I was going. In one or two of the pictures you can see the moods and effects that I moved towards - a storm over the island. Prior to that it had been 'a lump of watercolour here, a lump of watercolour there, and a rock’. Basic elements. The landscape's there but it's constructional: the approach was constructivist. I hadn't worked out how to put all the elements together in the way I can now. I needed time and I was teaching.”

The commitment he’s made in the last ten nine years has been complete. He lives and breathes to paint. There were Peter Davis paintings prior to 2013, of course, and many had great merit, but the pictures that will define him as an artist are the ones he’s made in the last few years, and the ones he’ll make in the future. His technical capability has advanced at pace in this period, and every exhibition demonstrates development. The scale of his art-making experiences and the intensity of his application are both playing a part in technique advancement, confidence, and consequent willingness to take greater risk. The results are clear - his mastery of the process is enabling higher levels of creative control on the paper. His instincts are producing greater beauty without losing the freshness and excitement. I think he’s getting better all of the time.

“I think that's absolutely right.  I've had more time to get better at it. I now know and I can predict exactly when I do something what the result is going to be. Give or take a margin of error. There are so many variables with watercolour and you've got to be aware of them, but now I can pretty much predict where it's going and how not necessarily to control it, but to make it go where I'd like it to go. There's still the total unknown of when you set it down, what's it going to do, what's the result going to be, and that's still the magic thing that makes me go out of the studio and come back the next day and say: Wow!”

Screak, Watercolour, bodycolour and chalk on paper 2022 (50x70cm)

“More recently I've been trying to reduce the colours down to six or eight, sometimes three or four if I can get away with it, purely because I think there's more interest for me in playing around with the tones and mixing those colours that I've got. I build in with that this concept of creating mood. I don't think you can create a mood with too many colours, too many things, too much going on. I try to reduce that down.”

And that’s the key to rejection. When does Peter decide a painting isn’t working?

“If there's too much in it. I know when it's gone too far. You can try scraping it. Try doing things to it, but you get to a point where it's gone. You just say goodbye to it. A lot of it is to do with too much going on in the picture. Your eyes are bombarded with too much information, or the technique has gone haywire, or the colours don't work.. it doesn't speak to me any more. I've got to be able to live with it. Pierre Bonnard said that a painting has to be a little world that's self-sufficient. If it can't exist, too bad. But I'm getting better at it. I don't throw so much away.”

And once it’s done? “I like a well cut mount. Watercolour paper can be delicate. I want it to be framed properly behind glass” Then there’s the titles. There’s a well known anecdote around the huge number of words that Inuits have for snow. Peter suggests Shetlanders have an equally large word collection for wind and rain. He started using local dialect words thirty years ago, and “A friend introduced me to John Scott’s book, ‘Orkney And Shetland Weather Words’ and it’s now turning into an inspiration for pictures. I might find a word that I like, and look for source material in response to it. I’ll actually write the word on the tape around a new picture.The piece won’t necessarily be about the title, and in many ways it’s the poetic sound that’s the inspiration. But in these instances, the title comes first”

So, where does his broader inspiration and approach come from? There are no obvious artistic reference points. No artists that he seems to have followed. Casual conversations find him referencing Turner regularly, and there’s no doubt that JMWT has played a part in his creative development. Pressing him on this, there might be surprises for those who don’t know him well.

“Turner for watercolour, definitely. But you mentioned Caspar David Friedrich. Caspar's there. I was fascinated with Friedrich's structure. You look at his pictures and the structure is so clear, there are so many bits in it, but compositionally it's so beautiful. I've always worked to try and come up with a satisfying composition. The other person who influenced me and that's right from school was Claude Lorrain. The fact that when he titled his paintings, no matter what they were about, the first word was "Landscape": "Landscape with the death of Orpheus", "Landscape with the Ponte Molle".. It’s important because I think he was more concerned with making a landscape itself, and the human elements were incidental. And again, it's the structure : it's a classical structure, a classical composition.”

But they were such unnatural landscapes?

“Very unnatural, because he's put them together, he's taken a bit of this and a bit of that. They're abstracted landscapes, because he's putting them together to make a satisfying composition. I feel that I do the same thing. I did a whole series of Claude Lorrain paintings in the 90's.I must have done maybe eight or nine, based on Claude's paintings, taking not the themes but the structure of those paintings, and making my own versions. They don't look anything like Claude, but they've got the structure there. When I was 16 our art teacher took us to the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle to see paintings by Claude Lorrain, and they blew my mind. They're vast. There's a lovely one in Edinburgh in the National Gallery. Instantly, at that point, I wanted to be a painter. I wanted to paint pictures. I didn't necessarily want to learn about oil paint, but I wanted to paint. It was a really strong wish. And every time I see his paintings I'm back to that time, seeing every leaf and all of the details that Claude came out with, and the structure, and how he led you into that landscape. You could walk into that landscape and go somewhere, you knew what the weather was like, you knew that around the hill there was something  you could go and walk to, and I thought that was magical. I wanted to be Claude Lorraine. I really did.”

Are there no more contemporary influences?

“Yes, well we can say Georgia O'Keeffe, we can say Helen Frankenthaler, we can say Morris Louis. Morris Louis for the freedom. I saw a fabulous Morris Louis exhibition in the 70's at the Hayward Gallery in London. Never seen anything since, apart from a few in Copenhagen, but it just blew my mind allowing the freedom of acrylic paint to phwoosh..”

Shoostran, Watercolour on paper 2020 (50x70cm)

Well now that he mentions it, just look at all those colour harmonies in Peter’s work, creating accord and discord, wonder and mystery, mood and atmosphere. Morris Louis and Claude Lorrain, freedom and composition, meet Friedrich, Nolde and Munch, the Northen Romantics – in Shetland, in the mind of a retired art teacher. He looks at the world around him with the enthusiasm and excitement of a young man, works with the determination and patience of maturity, thrills himself through his constant search for the Wow! factor; and thrills his viewers with his brilliance - composition, structure, risk, harmony, rhythm, all held in fragile suspense.

And the sales of his pictures are growing too. He’s now exhibiting regularly at Birch Tree Gallery, Edinburgh; Kilmorack Gallery, Beauly; and Gallery Heinzel in Aberdeen. He’s won prizes at Aberdeen Art Society’s last two exhibitions. This Autumn, he has pictures in the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh.

Has the gallery interest spurred him to work more? “No. I have to paint”

Dwarg, Watercolour and bodycolour on paper,2021  (50x70cm)

Roger Spence

A.

Peter updates us on the pictures selected to illustrate the piece - as of August 2022:

Heilia Water, frozen (2nd variant) and Scuddrie are mentioned in the article

Scuddrie,Rolk, Riv, Hoolan (Skeldaness) and Voe are all currently in the Birch Tree Gallery. They show different aspects of my current painting methods.

Screak is currently with a framer in Ullapool and heading directly to Kilmorack Gallery soon.

Brim-skod, Clett is at the Mixed Summer show at Gallery Heinzel

Dwarg is a painting I've chosen for a Scottish Gallery show in November

Shoostran is in my studio…I chose it to illustrate my fascination with edges that go from the land into the sea, inspired by my place….Shoostran is the highest point in the area (it even has a trig point on top!) and the landscape falls away into the sea.