Little Village

We’ve got a fresh window display at The Rowley Gallery, full of bright new paintings by Anne Davies. Blocks of colour stacked like walls, their stones inscribed and daubed with patterns of lichens and mosses that turn into streets and trees and fields and houses. Lyrical maps of remembered journeys.

Summer Fields

Harvest Fields

A Stand of Trees

And a collection of painted wooden houses, a little village of memories.

Old dreams and new developments.

New dreams and endless possibilities.

I left my visit to The Rowley Gallery back in April with a huge bagful of little wooden houses. I lined them up in my studio, primed them and lined them up again. As I worked through, went away to paint pictures and draw in my book and came back again, I found it such a complete pleasure to keep returning to work on these little shapes. I’ve recently felt an itch to go back to making paintings that are less figurative, something more purely about colour and texture, leaving to one side the complex and difficult-to-resolve compositions of my current work. Although they never stopped being houses, sheds, dwellings, as I worked on each little panel became it’s own simple abstract. I indulged my love of fluorescent pink, deep green and striking blue and set the houses in groups together, creating different colour passages and relationships between them. I used the same layering technique as in my paintings but the simplicity of the form allowed a greater freedom. I layered paint, made marks, covered them and uncovered them again until each one felt complete. Now the wooden houses have returned to the gallery as a little village.

Anne Davies