We're thrilled to announce that Davy Brown has joined the ScotlandArt Gallery. Inspired by the coasts and farms of his Galloway home, his paintings are full of affection for their subjects. With influences including the Scottish Colourists and the St Ives School, Brown's deft use of colour and form has gained him over seventy solo shows across the years. We asked him about his first forays into art and the evolution of his artistic practice.
What led you to become an artist?
I don't believe that I made a conscious choice to become a painter. I think that that choice was made for me. I knew before I even went to school that that was what I wanted to do
Where are you from and how does that affect your work?
I was born in Kilmarnock in 1950, the oldest of three children. My father was an electrician who worked down the pits of the Ayrshire coalfield. He encouraged me to draw, principally because a career in art was much preferable to working down the mines. Encountering the work of that other Kilmarnock artist, Robert Colquhoun, at the age of twelve was a major factor in my determination to gain entry to the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), which I did in 1968.
What’s the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given in your creative practice?
[At GSA] I found myself in a stultifying experimental section called Section 5, which had little to do with fine art, and at the end of my first year, I took my portfolio of reductionist Bauhaus designs to my Kilmarnock Academy art teacher, John McKissock, whose advice was, "Get yourself down to St. Ives, and meet the 'Big Boys!'" I followed his advice and for most summers until the early 80s, I spent several weeks in Cornwall, meeting artists like Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Terry Frost, John Wells and Paul Mount among others. This was a liberating experience for me and St. Ives abstraction influenced me greatly.
What is your relationship with colour in your paintings?
One of the principal elements in my work is my fixation with colour, born out of a reaction to the muddy paint of GSA in the 60s and early 70s, and my love of Cézanne and the Scottish Colourists. I still love to experiment with colour figurations.
How has your style changed over time?
My father had died while I was still at Art School and my mother was insistent that I had a teaching qualification "behind me" and so, I found myself at Moray House College of Education in 1973, and subsequently taught in schools in Ayrshire and Galloway. By the 1990s I had adopted a more commercial style of painting and in 2002 I resigned my post as Principal Teacher of Art at Douglas Ewart High School in Newton Stewart in order to achieve my life-long ambition to become a full-time professional painter. In the intervening years, I never stopped painting, and in fifty years, I have held over seventy one-man shows throughout the UK as well as in the USA.
What is your favourite medium to work in?
Apart from a period in the 1990s when I made forays into acrylics, my preferred medium has always been oils.
Davy Brown's work is available here with free delivery.