Ian Davenport: Swatch Colourfall
Ian Davenport’s work is instantly recognisable: colourful, dripping lines of paint that come together to make a blend that is both aesthetically pleasing and visually intense. Colour and its dizzying effects – saturation, contrast, warmth – are the driving forces behind Davenport’s oeuvre.
We spoke to Davenport about his beginnings, evolution and his work, including his recent collaboration with Swatch to celebrate the iconic watchmaker’s support of The Venice Biennale’s Biennale Arte. Read on as we delve into Davenport’s world and unique style, which he mentions has greatly developed over the years, despite originating from a place that is very simple and human.
“To begin with, I was trying to be very specific about what colour might do,” he explains. “I didn’t really know how to approach it. I suppose as I’ve gotten older I’ve become much more confident about it, and I’ve tried not to approach it from the sense of knowing what it’s going to do and actually allowing it to surprise me and just going with it.
“That is actually the way I think one has to deal with colour,” he adds. “Because it’s just so unbelievably unpredictable, it’s just an amazing thing. And yet at the same time I’m very drawn to it. I think as human beings, we’re biologically programmed to be drawn towards saturated colour.”
Davenport often eschews traditional painting materials, having poured paint with watering cans, dotted with pins or even used fans to blow strands of paint. For some of his past exhibitions, Davenport poured household gloss paints onto a tilted surface, typically medium-density fibreboards or aluminium panels, rather than traditional canvases, letting gravity draw the paint down over the surface. Though his style is anything but mundane, Davenport says he often draws inspiration from everyday objects: plastic curtains in a kebab shop, corrugated metal roofs and tunnel entrances, to name a few.
“I’ve been more interested in paintings as a form of art than pretty much any other thing,” he says of his initial attraction to unconventional art materials. “It’s just what I am drawn towards. But I did notice that when I was at art school, I tried to go on a bit of a journey, I suppose, and discover what sort of artist I could be.
“I felt more comfortable in and amongst sculptors, and I liked the way that they were very imaginative in playing around with materials and questioning what kind of materials they would use. I guess it started to make me think about the way that I could play with materials or adopt different approaches to painting. I guess my paintings are quite sculptural, they’re sort of in between painting and sculpting. I would say that I’m almost a sculptor who makes paintings.”
In the nearly 30 years that Davenport has been professionally producing art, he has made a name for himself in the contemporary art scene. His first solo show was in 1990, just two years after he graduated from Goldsmiths College. Just a year after that, he was nominated for the Turner Prize.
His life since then has been a whirlwind of international exhibitions and high-profile commercial work. In 2006, he was commissioned by the Southwark Council to create a piece that would revitalise a dark underpass. His 48-metre creation, Poured Lines, is one of the largest pieces of public art and has since become a London landmark.
He now uses a syringe to spread his colours, meticulously squirting paint onto the canvas and letting it drip down in a perfectly straight line, merging into a cacophony of colours at the bottom. It’s a process – this delicate balance between controlling the flow of paint and allowing it to drip freely – that took Davenport nearly a decade to perfect. This seemingly randomised technique draws influence from the Abstract Expressionism art movement in the United States, and particularly the ‘drip’ paintings of Jackson Pollock.
Born in Kent, Davenport lived in Belfast and Northumberland before setting just outside Manchester. Art and music – Davenport is a musician and often incorporates rhythm into his artwork – were driving presences at an early age.
“From being a very young child, I’ve been interested in both [art and music],” he says. “When I was about four years old, my mum and dad gave me a tin drum…Unfortunately it was incredibly loud. I think I had it for about two days and then it mysteriously disappeared. I spent the next few years trying to persuade them to buy me a drum kit, and they absolutely refused. So I built one in the end out of tin cans and coffee cups, so I had this mental drum kit in my bedroom.
“I was quite lucky,” he adds. “My mum had gone to art school and she encouraged all of her kids to draw and paint and write and be creative. I guess at that time, in the 70’s, people just didn’t have a lot of extra money. So, if she could get the kids to sit down at the table and draw and paint, it was a cheaper alternative. I think there was a sort of pragmatism, too – it kept us quiet and out of her way.”
This incorporation of music, rhythm and sound into Davenport’s art make his creative process something of a live effort. The colour’s interactions with each other are very much dependent on time, creating a departure from any sort of still life paintings or digital illustrations, for example.
“My paintings are performative,” he says. “The lines of colour are dripped down, so that takes a particular moment, a particular number of seconds each time – maybe 30 or 40 seconds each time to pour a line. It has to be done at a particular pace as well, you can’t just go very fast. It is quite meditative, but there is also an idea of timing in that.
“It’s funny with artworks,” he adds, “because you’re really aware of what you’re doing. I try not to question it too much. I don’t know if it’s just superstition, but I feel like if I look into it too much, it’s going to lose some of the magic. When you get closer to the painting, you get all these subtle things that happen – the way that the lines of colour run into each other, they’re not perfect and they create all these incidents and beautiful dripping marks and splatters…I think it’s one of those paintings that reveals quite a lot if you give it a bit of time and attention.”
A member of the group of Goldsmith art-school students who became known as the Young British Artists, one of Davenport’s first shows was at Damien Hirst’s iconic Freeze exhibition in 1988. Hirst, who wrote an introduction to a book of Davenport’s work, gives him credit for inspiring his famous spot paintings.
Davenport says that, in recent years, he has pushed his work further into the realm of the abstract.
“Some of the different-looking paintings that I’ve made, some of them have been very simple, some of them have been much more about shapes,” he explains. “But generally they’ve been questioning the way that materials have been poured or dripped. I like the balance between something that is organic and physical, and then something that I try to control as well. I’m drawn to it.”
One of his latest works is Giardini Colourfall, a large-scale installation crafted for the Swatch Pavilion at The Venice Biennale 2017. The piece extends over a 3.8 x 14-meter aluminium panel and consists of a structured, rhythmic sequence of more than 1,000 colours which, poured from the top of the piece, pool into each other at the base. The large-scale piece was tried and tested in Davenport’s studio, where he shaped his largest studio wall to take the form of the space in Venice. “We looked at space in Venice and it’s was quite large, so we needed to think about how they [the viewer] would think about accessing the park, what they would see and what their experience would be. We went in and inspected the studio piece up and close and from afar to make sure it worked and would suit that space.”
Davenport has also collaborated with Swatch to create the new Swatch Art Special watch, which is titled WIDE ACRES OF TIME. The watch is available in a limited and numbered edition of 1,966 pieces and we have one to giveaway across the month of June. The watch takes cues from American artist Sam Francis, who had himself designed several watches for the company decades ago.
Click here to enter our Swatch X Ian Davenport Limited Edition Watch giveaway.
“[Francis] cut out a canvas in a very big watch shape and approached it with his normal painting style, which is sort of a flicking and splattering, and playing around with paint as well,” he says. It is reminiscent of my work as well, and it’s very beautiful. Then the piece was photographed and reduced in scale. I thought that was really interesting, and we started playing around, painting on a watch shape and just seeing how that would work.
“I felt pretty confident with what we had done,” he adds. “I thought it looked really good. If it hadn’t looked good, I would have pulled it and worked on something else. The advantage was, because we had started [early] to play around with it, we had a few months just to chuck different ideas around. So I thought that we were quite prepared and we had done quite a lot of different research into the ways that we could approach it. So when we hit upon this, I thought, ‘Yeah, this is definitely the one.’”
In the coming months, Davenport says he has a number of commercial shows, including an exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary Museum which has him particularly excited, given that it’s his “first big public art gallery show in the US”. A project for the Venice Biennale of Architecture is also on the cards was well as another show in June and another in Dubai in November.
Despite Davenport’s busy schedule and his positive reputation in the contemporary art world, he says he doesn’t have any grandiose ideals about what exactly the viewer should get out of his art. For Davenport, his art is about looking at the world around us, particularly its striking array of colours, in a bit of a different light.
“We’re told an awful lot in the world what to think and what to feel. I kind of don’t want to tell anyone what to think or what to feel, I just want them to maybe look at the painting and hopefully, when they go away from it, they look at colour a little bit more carefully, they look at their surroundings with a bit more observation.
“‘We take the world too much for granted. It is an amazing and beautiful place.”
Stay tuned to fluoro for more from The 57th Venice Biennale and subscribe here for the announcement of our upcoming Swatch Art Special watch giveaway.
