DAVIDA ALLEN – THE LIGHT WITHIN.

When I question Davida about her paintings, whether it is the subject matter or ways of producing the work, I must always expect a disarmingly simple yet lateral response.  

The paintings have no real equivalent in words because they are contradictory in that they have the innocence of children, particularly in the way they are built diagrammatically like a child leaving infant symbolism and entering that somewhat geometric exploration of space while at the same time, reaching out for a means to communicate human feelings.   It is not totally unique as a process as Jean de Buffet constructed his forms in a free manner, and yet this has nothing of naïve art or folk art as its basis.   The work is extremely sophisticated.   Davida works within the concerns of the great colourists and expressionists, whether it is Klimt, Bonnard, Matisse, Kandinsky, Beckman or the American abstract expressionists.   Her work is a logical branch of the colourists and she uses colour intuitively and unerringly.   There is always the right equivalent for a night picture with a sense of lighting in a room or a bright sunlit landscape with crimson rosellas.   Her recent paintings are figures concerned with their interrelation as people with one another; a domestic interior, often vibrantly framed, and a remarkably correct Australian landscape outside the windows.   There is that sense of sparseness and transparency of the bush.   The works are a response to her life inside and connecting to the outside through windows.  

If I analyse the way the figures are made I am drawn to the way cubism came into being, that is a greater felt reality through superimposed views.   In the case of Davida’s work this is purely intuitive and gives a reality unlike photographic reality, but rather a reality of touch as if the whole human body was revealed.   These figures are neither clothed nor unclothed but each is a presence in the room.   The use of multi-colours with figures and unnatural colours and the outlining with a colour is another device often used in the history of art when the evidence of the light within pulsated through a surrounding colour.   The change may be due to the significance of the figure.   A holy figure may pulsate through gold; a ghostly figure at night may have a heavy white outline.   A blue outline may be the artist’s feelings for the blues of the landscape in streams and gums.   The outline is also a containment for the colour held within the figure which can be startling, contrasting and active.   The colours are purely emotional but there is an uncanny ability to hold and construct the painting.

As we move from the interior to the landscape these areas become contained and a separation occurs with the interior drama.   The connection in the viewer is as if the figures are inside and the bird song is outside.   We do not need to entwine the kangaroos outside with the spatial composition inside.

Davida has said she works in episodes.   This is through personal necessity, and because the life of the painting when wet, finishes quickly.   There is a very strict technical limitation to make any changes.   Whereas other methods of painting allow for changes to be made, Davida’s direct hands on caressing of the paint, the substance of light, cannot easily be reformed without destroying the image or its immediacy.   Throughout her life she has always worked with directness, her very earliest works were uncompromising.   The emotion she expressed in the series “Death of my Father” showed the journey of a soul in sorrow.   The actor paintings, the children, the housewife reflect an artist of great individuality, far from the dictates of fashion and popularity.   Her work is a reflection of her life.

If I may quote some of the things Davida has told me – There is no need or desire to make marks other than the most simple facts and so her work is as uncomplicated and diagrammatic as a child.   However in saying this, she is fully aware of the diagram or sign in other cultures; the Egyptians with two perspectives of a figure.   A figure walking “the eyes focus is contrary to the direction of the head.   In Aboriginal art the figures have specifically simple signs or diagrams for male and female ---“   She says that her people are “abstract personalities – deliberately so that the figure is not a specific person”.   She allows room for an audience to imagine the figures as universal.   To examine Davida’s images is to come into direct communion with her life.

The colours used show the world within, that is both the painter’s imagination and the world between this imagination and the felt reality of another parallel world.   That is the passion of the artist, to let that other possibility manifest itself in the work.   The viewer searches the work with no fixed expectations but with an openness to the other world revealed to us.

William Robinson 2008