Alan Davie

Dragons’ Eggs Assorted is a wild, joyous painting that was made using Alan Davie’s distinctive improvisatory method. He espoused an automatic technique in which the artist allowed the richness of life and existence itself to flow through their work. This painting was probably made over several sessions and uses an energetic, unplanned accumulation of colours, marks and forms. The date inscribed on the reverse of the canvas, August 1962, is probably the date of completion; Davie often worked on his paintings over an extended period of time. A defining quality of Davie’s mature idiom was the use of concise, strongly outlined symbols, combined with exuberant contrasts of strong colour. Dragons’ Eggs Assorted uses two motifs that recur throughout the artist’s career, both of them silhouetted in black outlines: a circle, some speckled with black dots; and a ladder—two parallel lines connected by tightly spaced connecting marks or rungs. The circle motif accrued a range of associations in Davie’s titles: a wheel, an eye, an egg, a ball, the moon. The titles of other paintings from 1962 suggest the same search for an intense, excited form of life: Signs of Life; It’s Heavenly Inside; Ecstatic Parrot. Of his titles, the critic Michael Horovitz suggested they were ‘lightly allusive as of [Paul] Klee or of bebop, appended to suggest one of many compatible entrances’. Davie himself suggested that ‘[t]he real thing is always strange: that is, beyond understanding.’

Nevertheless, Davie’s symbolism has comprehensible roots—even if the meaning and specific applications of a symbol remain enigmatic. When asked about symbolism in his work, he said:

"I suppose its roots are in my Celtic heritage. I have always had a deep concern for animalistic things. I am interested now in the symbolism of the modern age. For instance, it is well known that ancient man attached great significance to the shape of the wheel. It can have a multitude of meanings: the sun, moon, the female sexual organ, or as a symbol of communication. I believe the machine is an attempt by modern man to find a most elaborate symbolism."

When this painting was made, Davie lived in a converted stable block in Rush Green, Hertfordshire, and a summer cottage near Land’s End in Cornwall. His creative method was improvisatory and rooted in chance discoveries developed without any clearly defined subject or preparation. Describing the artist at work, Horovitz wrote: ‘Davie dances out of trance-like intervals with explosive agility and gusto’. Davie himself believed he was living in ‘a spiritual age’ in which the artist was ‘a prophet’, ‘one who utters that which is meaningful in a timeless sense, not out of reason or knowledge of the past, but out of the eternal NOW which is everlasting fresh and wonderful.’ He gave this account of his experience whilst painting: ‘When I am working, I am aware of a striving, a yearning, the making of many impossible attempts at a kind of transmutation—a searching for a formula for the magical conjuring of the unknowable.’

Like his near contemporary Peter Lanyon, Alan Davie went gliding. He became ‘increasingly obsessed’ in late 1960. His ‘first solo aerobatics in a glider’ took place in October 1962, shortly after he had painted Dragons’ Eggs Assorted in August that year. Of this experience, he wrote, ‘What a curious thing to be standing on the rudderpedals looking vertically downward.’ ‘I could see little patches of small round trees in perfect rectangular fields, all a kind of yellowish green, coming up at me.’ A similar visual phenomenon is registered in Dragons’ Eggs Assorted—the egg-like forms might be trees distributed in a landscape and viewed from the air. The ladder at the centre of the painting might be interpreted as a road. His home environment also suggested certain visual hallmarks of his painting, populated as it was by ‘bright carpets and furniture, ornaments and totems from remote climes and cultures’.

Dragons’ Eggs Assorted was included in Davie’s display at the São Paulo Bienal in 1963, for which he was awarded the painting prize—a commendation that reflected ‘his now accepted international stature’, as the art historian Alan Bowness wrote in 1967. Characterising Davie’s work of the early sixties, Bowness wrote: ‘There is a positive, optimistic quality about the pictures that makes them among the most life-enhancing of our time.’