Born in 1924, Leo Davy (1924-1987) studied painting first at Kingston School of Art under Reginald Brill and then at the Slade School of Fine Art whilst the school was evacuated to Oxford during WWII. At the beating heart of post-war abstraction in Britain, as a young man Davy counted Kyffin Williams and John Latham amongst his close friends, and exhibited his paintings alongside William Gear, Victor Pasmore, Prunella Clough, and Alan Davie at a mixed summer show at Gimpel Fils gallery in 1950. Many of these artists were on the cusp of achieving international success and Davy, like Gear and Davie, was situating his work within artistic developments on the continent, particularly CoBrA. A fiercely independent spirit and increasing deafness contributed to Davy’s withdrawal from the mainstream London art world, and his subsequent move to North Devon by the 1960s. Davy possessed a strong philosophical bent, informing his painting with avid reading and friendships with radical intellectuals including psychiatrist R.D. Laing. The driving urge behind his art, from the 1950s until his death in 1987, was to explore what he termed “non-verbal concepts”, that which existed before language. Aesthetically, this manifested in abstract painting rooted in experience. For Davy, abstraction in paint provided a route for the viewer to reconnect with the innate and the instinctive. From the 1970s until his death in 1987, he channelled the primordial energy of the Cornish landscape - churning waves, broad skies, starry nights, and fleeting light effects - into abstract paintings predominantly in white, blue, and pink, of intense romance. Cornwall became a stage-set, a theatre for performances of pure emotion, expressivity, and elemental forces. Painted the year before Davy's death, 'White Painting II' appears initially a work bleached of colour, realised in swathes of unadulterated white on a sizeable scale. Close scrutiny reveals underpainting of blues and pinks are visible on the surface: these tones, redolent of Davy's Cornish period, permeat the pure white surface. Across the skin of the work, sensuous patterns materialise, borne out through Davy's handling of the paint. The encrusted white paint of the surface, not colour or contour, generates form. These patterns are infintely suggestive, speaking to the liminal space of the subconscious, to the once-known, half-remembered images of dreams, fantasies, and memories. 'White Painting II' is monumental yet subtle, feminine and mysterious, suggestive of glimpses of that hidden below the surface.