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23/11/2007

Two exhibitions

Kettle's Yard, Cambridge

Kettle’s Yard celebrates the Christmas season with two exhibitions, of collages by Francis Davison and drawings by Jack Shanahan. Generations apart, each artist, in his own way is separate from the mainstream of contemporary art, and both share a delight in the intuitive combination of colours.

For the last thirty-two years of his life, Francis Davison made coloured paper collages. A Cambridge graduate, he began as a poet but turned to painting in the late 1940s after Patrick Heron, a friend from school days, had invited him to St Ives in Cornwall.

In 1950, now married to the artist Margaret Mellis, he moved to Suffolk, first to Syleham and then to Southwold. The early paintings and collages confess their Cornish roots and follow Alfred Wallis’s advice not to use too many colours. But, progressively, colour took over and, while a strong sense of landscape remained, any hint of depiction was dismissed. Davison's mature collages are made of coloured papers, torn or cut, added and subtracted, built and adjusted towards their eventual, accumulative shape. Through shifts of colour, speed and scale they seem to encompass every human emotion and the full range of natural forces.

Davison was born in 1919 and died in 1984 at the age of 65, a few months after a major one-man exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, which deeply impressed the young Damien Hirst. By choice an outsider, working in isolation, Francis Davison has still to be fully acknowledged as one of the major British abstract artists and colourists of the 20th century.

Jack Shanahan is 24. His drawings are full of life, colour, humour and acute observation. An ardent Manchester United supporter, musician and fan of ’50s and ’60s rock and roll, his other interests sometimes crop up in his work. More often, he picks up on something he notices – the shed or swing in his grandparents’ garden, a fire hydrant sign or traffic lights. At other times the shape of a number or a letter may trigger a pattern. Beginning with black outlines, he likens some of his drawings to stained glass, setting colour against colour to see how they react to each other and how they can suggest three-dimensional space and form.

Jack Shanahan divides his life between Bordeaux and Dublin where he has been supported by Stewarts, a foundation dedicated to the provision of lifelong care, regardless of the degree of intellectual and other disability experienced by its service users. He is about to take up a place on the Certificate in Contemporary Living course at Trinity College, Dublin.

Kettle's Yard
Castle Street - Cambridge

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