Francis Davison

1919-1984

Francis Davison was a Cambridge graduate who started out as a poet but turned to painting in the late 1940's after a school friend invited him to St Ives.

In 1950 after a few years in Cornwall he moved to Suffolk with his wife the fellow artist Margaret Mellis. His early paintings and collages of landscapes and cottages seem to confess their Cornish roots but progressively his work became more colourful and whilst a strong sense of landscape remained and any  hint of depiction was dismissed.

For the last thirty years of his life Davison mainly produced coloured collages that exhibit a sense of maturity sometimes absent from this particular medium. They are made from coloured papers, interlocking or overlaid, added or subtracted, built and carefully adjusted to form their final accumulative shapes.

By choice an outsider, Francis Davison has yet to be fully acknowledged as one of the major British abstract artists and colourists of the 20th century.