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What Now? Paul Davies
Australia Art Collector 29/10/14
Kate Britton
You’ve recently made the move to Los Angeles. How is it treating you?
I moved to West Hollywood in February this year with my wife Sarah and am represented by the Heather James Fine Art Gallery. The Gallery deals with new and secondary work from Andy Warhol, Picasso, Yves Klein and Damien Hirst. It has spaces in Palm Desert and Jackson Hole here in the States and I have a solo exhibition at the Palm Desert gallery in January 2015.
I am super excited about this show, as neighbouring Palm Springs has been a big inspiration for my work. I have made many trips to California in the past and used the modern architecture for inspiration for my paintings and found similarities with modernist architecture in Australia. Its great to be based in LA because it makes travel to Europe and the UK more accessible for exhibitions and visiting galleries, while remaining close to Australia. Travel is also a big part of the inspiration for my work and being in LA is great for this access.
How does this passion for Palm Springs and travel and its influence manifest in your work?
Travel is a big part of my work partly because I like visiting new places and meeting people but also to observe similarities in architecture and landscape. I’ve used modernist architecture (of Palm Springs) for inspiration for my paintings and found similarities in architecture in Australia, due to the outdoor lifestyle and warm climate. For me the paintings are meant to be ambiguous. These elements are actual locations, however (they are) collaged on the picture through stencilling to create fictitious scenes.
An important element in my method is photographing source materials. These images are taken at various locations to objectively record my presence at a particular site. However this objectivity becomes blurred once I manipulate the image by hand, for example with stencilling and collage.
When I think of Palm Springs I think Joshua Tree and the kind of mysticism that surrounds it- does this aspect of the landscape inform your work?
Yes, the first time I visited Joshua Tree was in high school with my family. Mum and dad were kind of hippies and into the music of that era so going there and experiencing the place first hand was exciting as a kid. Sarah, my wife and I went back a couple of years ago, it’s a great road trip and the landscape is vast and lunar like.
There are a lot of other influences at play in your work aside from travel, including many from design and architecture. Where do you draw inspiration?
Most of my inspiration is from nature, as I enjoy being outdoors and my family didn’t have a TV till I was about 14. I drew as a kid and that has stuck with me too. I also photograph buildings at various places and collage these with the natural landscape photos to create idealised scenes. The paintings remind me of the places I’ve been to create them, however I hope that as they are devoid of human form the viewer is invited to generate their own response. The street I have moved to in West Hollywood is packed with many styles of architecture, across the road is the Charlie Hotel built for Charlie Chaplin and his guests back in the 1920’s and in the next street is Schindlers’s modernist house built around the same time. I find it interesting that these styles can coexist and tell different stories of their occupants.