Indelible Fine Art — Brighton

Alan Davie

Jazz, myth & wild colour

Scottish painter Alan Davie never aimed for polite, tidy abstraction. He moved between jazz, poetry, myth and pure instinct, letting symbols, animals and half-remembered dreams fall onto the canvas in blazing colour.

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Who is Alan Davie?

The short version

Alan Davie was never about fitting neatly into the art world. Born in Grangemouth, Scotland, in 1920, he came from a working-class family, fell for painting and jazz early, and never let go of that sense of risk and excitement.

He wasn’t interested in making polite, perfectly controlled pictures. He wanted the work to feel alive, messy, spiritual and a bit unknown – something you experience rather than simply admire from a distance.

Over seven decades he developed his own visual language of animals, masks, ladders, suns and strange diagrams: part ritual, part game, part map of the subconscious. You don’t have to “decode” it – you just have to stand in front of it and let it hit you.

What inspired Alan Davie?

Where the symbols and colour come from

Jazz & improvisation

Jazz wasn’t just background music for Davie – it was a philosophy. He loved how musicians improvise in real time, embracing risk and surprise. His paintings borrow that energy: no strict plan, just a starting point and a willingness to follow the mark wherever it wants to go.

Ancient & tribal art

He was captivated by prehistoric carvings, tribal masks and talismans. Rather than treating them as museum relics, he saw them as living expressions of a shared subconscious – symbols that keep resurfacing in his own work as totems, animals and mysterious diagrams.

Nature, myth & spirituality

From Zen Buddhism and Eastern mysticism to Celtic folklore and the Scottish landscape, Davie treated painting as a spiritual practice – a way of surrendering control and letting something larger move through him and onto the paper or canvas.

Jazz & rhythm Totems & symbols Myth & ritual Improvised abstraction Colour as energy
“Art just happens, like falling in love.”
Alan Davie

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