Extracts from A Tale of Two Cities
Essay by David Brett, January 1991
It is not appropriate, in an essay made by a friend and colleague, to advance large claims on behalf of an artist and his work. And it is possible that Davies' drawing sometimes becomes mannered or predictable, since he has produced so much work. But the kinds and varieties of work done by his drawing indicates, to this writer, that we are looking at a body of work with a certain stature.
The large drawings ('Games that People Play', pen and ink) that accompany this exhibition are done in a style that seems to have been developed for the linocuts, reduced to it's barest expression, and have links with the large woodcuts. Forms are traded in energetic outline, with very little attempt to depict surfaces or light. This imparts a sense of monumental proportion even to the smaller features, and the very large scale suggests the terse simplifications involved in mural painting. I shall suggest later in this essay that this ample treatment and plain linearity comes from the artist's desire to move out of the depths of social (and perhaps personal) despair toward a positive vision of the City.
The 'Urban Portraits' (1984) on the other hand, seem to condense from a cloud of tiny marks, scratches and pentimenti; there are few carefully defined profiles, and the forms flow into and out of one another just as the pictorial spaces bend and buckle as in dreams. In this graphic world there is no real hierarchy of lines, any more than there is an order of objects. Anything can be joined to anything else. Streets become walls, night becomes day, and the living sphinx grows out of the turret of a tank; we are not at all surprised to find a man crucified upon a telephone pole, or to find a vanities in the scrap yard. And this fantasia is the product of a needle upon metal.
Lithography however, is a more forgiving medium in which it is possible to have second and third thoughts, and which encourages a floppier kind of drawing. Series such as 'The Great Divide' (1988) in which the world of the DHSS is so unsparingly portrayed, are full of discontinuities and contradictions; fully three-dimensional forms coexist with shadows, figures start in one style to end in another and the only straight lines are those of that portray an architecture of temporary partitions. Such means exactly set forth the meaningless of such places. Most curious of all, areas of tone and the profiles marked out by lines are at a variance with areas of colour.
Colour is always at the edge of irrationality, unpredictable in its communication. I am aware that many people regard Davies as primarily a black-and-white artist, whose adventures into colour have been less successful, and this was a view with which I broadly concurred until, in preparation for writing the essay, I spent a period studying 'The Great Divide'. I discussed his use of colour with the artist, who described colour as a challenge; if it's there, then you have to do something about it. I suspect that Davies began to use colour to extend his general mastery of the print process, and in the early work (such as the 'Rhondda' prints of 1981) there is something arbitrary about the results. I take the burlesque 'Self Portraits' of 1983 as the point in which he achieved a natural and unselfconscious feeling for colour; in those prints he also established a characteristically sharp and personal 'spectrum', full of livid turquoise blues and greens, sharp yellows and a truly nasty line in reds and violets.
In 'The Great Divide', colour plays the leading part and does the work which the drawing does in other series; that is to say, it is the main bearer of the inner meaning, which lies within the working rather than upon the incidents and scenes depicted. There are few distinct colours and coloured areas, instead there is a kind of chromatic fog which obscures the scene as much as reveals it. Take for example No.4, the dominant hue is an institutional green; the sort of colour used on lavatory doors. It permeates both the space and most of the figures and objects within that space; some figures are entirely created out of it, as if they had no other existence, whilst further figures sink or emerge from his miasma by means of small lines or patches of red, yellow and blue. There are sources of light, but the dominant feeling is one of obscurity, because the areas of hue do not correspond with areas of tone. It is not at all clear why there should be those stains of rust and red upon the floor, or why thee barred window should be powder blue (and drawn out of 'normal' perspective) until we have pondered the image for some time. Then we recognise this colour for what it is - boredom visible; and the window becomes one we have looked at for three hours on end. Perhaps only those who have sat upon the metal chairs can know the full force of the half smothered hatred and rage that lies within this and the other prints in the series. For another example, take No.1, in which reds and blues and sandy yellows blend into a haze of dirty violet; this is the hue which encases the emblematic manager who, with argumentative pencil raised, dominates a distant meeting whilst those who are the objects of his management wait and wait. Or the use of blue in No.2, and No.6...or any other example. These colours present us with a hate-filled space. These words are chosen carefully. Where there is no sociality, there is only power; and these spaces are those in which the powerless have to submit.
In each of the print in this series, there is a predominant overall hue. These hues are, in each case, complex colours which are partly created by the mixing and overlaying of inks, and partly by the operations of the retina. The colours bear slight relation to the objects they may be placed against and the relative tone values seem to be arbitrary. The power of the images does not lie in the scenes that are shown, though these are drawn with an unsparing eye; it arises from the deformation of space and form as worked upon by colour. It strikes at us where we are unprotected and expecting pleasure. Colour, which should be a spring of delight, becomes a seepage of disgust and fear, speaking to us of corruption. It is not only social relations that have crumbled, in these scenes; it is the realm of the instincts. Carefully considered, these prints witness to a dissolution of the senses preliminary to death.
Death. I did not expect to use that word but it cannot be avoided. The dissolution of the social world dismembers human life. Dismembers, but does not entirely prevent. At the very bottom of this inferno, where human life appears to leave off, we don't find some imaginary Satan but men and women doing their best in the worst of circumstances; and these figures are linked by an imaginative logic to one another and to others in higher realms.
In the series 'No Surrender', we find a portrait of the most public man of all, the politician, moving up at us out of the darkness. Let us set aside; if we can, our knowledge that this is a portrait of a real politician and concentrate upon the expression and the pose; the accumulated doubt treachery and vulnerability (in about equal proportions), the sense that we get of the betrayed betrayer. Here is a man barely holding on to social existence, yet acting at its very heart and trying to embody it.
'Peter Grimes' is also, we notice, a modern man, inhabiting a fifty hovel which he shares with rats and pin-ups it is only his completely solitary state that prevents him from entering into 'The Wasteland'. He is however, a close cousin to a long series of mad men, and tramps, and winos who wanter about now as main characters, now as figures in the background hardly to be distinguished from the rubbish in which they are sitting. There are several figures in the 'Peter Grimes' album that, with changes, reoccur in 'The Great Divide' and elsewhere.
However, to regard 'Peter Grimes' and 'Self Portraits' as a source of imagery would, I think, misjudge the real case; we are dealing with a typology that is primarily visionary. It has, presumably, a pre-existence which is not in Time, but in imaginative Space. The one figure does not lead on, casually, to the next one, any more than siblings beget one another (though they carry a similar genetic material). This is a genuinely poetic world which like a real city, can be entered by several roads and through which we can walk, discovering new places and people which were there waiting for us all the time. But like a city, this world contains main roads and meeting points.
The series 'Self Portraits' is one such nexus; it is taken up later in 'The Comedy of Life'; the first is a personal/autobiographic, the second is a typical 'socio-graphic', but both function as a sort of rogue's gallery for the rest of the oeuvre.
The advantage to the artist of working in series, is that it helps to focus and develop themes in a consistent way, without the anxiety of wondering what to do next. It provides 'rules of the game' that enable the imagination to move in a free order.
As I understand it, the imagery of toys and military models that appears in the latest drawings, is a beginning of a resolution of this problem.
There is another set of characters which has this radiant function in the work as a whole; I mean the young people in 'Les Misérables' (1984). Two of these images are especially significant; the punkette drinking from a bottle, and the skinhead staring fixedly into the darkness. These, for the first time, combine the history of the art with contemporary subject matter, directly. Above, and apparently (but not certainly) behind the main figures are their emblematic counterparts - the classical reclining nude and the memento mort. The intense darkness and bright luminosity of these small prints gives them a dream-like atmosphere at variance with their ostensible subjects; the halo of bright hair around her face or his profile, the shining insets and the very smallness of the image all combine to give them the status of an icon, each representing one half of a binary system - of negative and positive, of life and death, of female and male, of light and dark, Eros and Thanatos. The radiance in one is the radiance of enthusiasm, in the other, of terror. (There is an analysis of these images by Slavka Sverakova, in the catelogue entitled 'Shore Road, Belfast' to which I am indebted.)
Children. Look through these images and you will find numerous infants, and toddlers, and little boys and girls, held upon knees, strapped into prams, creeping, holding onto furniture, gazing at the adult world as if it was a zoo. His drawing is wonderfully adapted to showing the physicality, the lack of comfort, the frustrations of a little child's life in which straps are too tight, hats too hot, leggings get twisted, drawers droop and nappies are wet. But it is these small citizens who suddenly, as the giant child 'Séan/Billy' inherit the world and The Maiden City, the city of London/Derry is the final location of a sequence of series, the 'master shot' of the script.
Davies is one of a number of artist from mainland Britain who lives and works in Northern Ireland, but it would be a mistake to see his work as being mainly about the North and its horrors. these are only two of his series directly addressed to these 'issues' - 'No Surrender' prints of 1984 and these last images. This is a point to be stressed. Those outside the North who see this exhibition and look at where it has come from, may wish to dismiss the subject matter in the same offhand way they dismiss television reports. Northern Ireland has long served as a sort of psychic dustbin for the rest of the islands - a place where repressed knowledge, let there be no doubt about it, is the recognition of which I wrote earlier; that these images are images of real conditions, widely met with, accurate both as reportage and as symbolic record. Those within the North should resist the tendency to see these prints as exclusively being about their own experience, because the same events take place everywhere and (armed insurrection set aside) the civic conditions of Belfast and Derry are hardly to be distinguished from great tracts of urban life elsewhere. In a number of important respects, they are preferable.
In conversation, the artist told me that the 'Urban Portraits' were about the events of 1984, set down as an imaginary diary; thus they were as much about the Miners' Strike, Greenham Common, and the Iranian war, as about Shore Road. And the series 'Les Misérables' was about autobiographical concerns just as much as it was about punks and skinheads. There are in fact, rather few scenes which are uniquely and specially Northern Irish; but what all have in common is, that they depict conditions of racial inequality. By this I do not mean merely material inequality (though that is enough to contemplate,); I mean those social and psychological conditions that arise when sociality is denied and fraternity ignored.
To live in the North of Ireland may bring no greater understanding of one's immediate environment; indeed, the particular character of our politics become more obscure as one gains an understanding . Insofar as these prints are political, it is Britain and Ireland as a whole that is revealed, since our countries are disputed ground between the last conservative state in Europe and the first ancient regime of the industrial epoch. It brings a peculiar and vivid insight into the City of Evil Government.
To write that is not to describe this, that, or any other policy, party or faction as 'evil', or to ascribe any political intention to the work; but to ask the reader to contemplate these prints and those conditions of which they are a mirror with as much dispassion as Lorenzetti cold depict the idea of Siena, and to transpose the one walled city into another.
The series 'No Surrender' (whose title recalls a siege) is the only directly political series - political in that it describes institutional behaviour, rather than individuals. The images in this group are all small and lack the dense and careful working of other prints. Those of the Orange Order and the July marches are in especially lurid colour; those of terms and army action are in the blackest of blacks. There is a bleakness about this series; the faces are mask-like, the hues infernal; a young boy in a parka and school satchel clasps a petrol bomb. and he and his world are in a saturated scarlet, as red as the blaze he is gleefully contemplating. Two huge dogs lap up some substance from the street; a couple sit at their table almost obliterated by their own bonfire, which seems to have come into their house. A woman undressing looks in her mirror and sees the leering face of a soldier. We become what we hate and we become what we fear.
Of central importance to this group is the portrait of Ian Paisley; or rather, the portrait of The Politician, bearing Paisley's features. I have already described this as the face of a betrayed betrayer; I think we should see the series 'No Surrender' as an insight into fear. How far it should be seen as a group portrait of real working class Protestant fears is not quite clear; my view is that Davies' main interest is in the rendering of the chronic insecurity that begets violence, not specific people. Thus faces are not fully individualised, and colours have become emblematic. I asked Davies why on this occasion, have had shown political symbolism openly. He replied that when every other artist was using pseudo-myth and the oblique statement, he had felt the need for an absolutely direct statement; as direct as a war reporter's camera. "I didn't want to pussy-foot around in this sort of situation." Insofar as this series is a group portrait, it is one of a people who fear they have been made the victims of a sustained confidence trick.
Davies does not, I believe, have anything that could be described as a 'political' postition; but he has at all times an electric sensitivity to the pressure changes of anxiety, fear, boredom, hatred and depression.
These are the passions of the dispossessed; and it follows from his knowledge of them, that he hates the exercise of power over others. But we should also look closely at his soldiers and police figures, to whom he gives the dignity of belonging to a group. Though they are rarely individualised, they are never demeaned. The drawing of these figures is generally monumental and their actions are portrayed as tasks, as work, not as 'oppression', nor even as bullying.
I have left the 'DerryA Tale of Two Cities (1990)' series till last because at the time of writing this, they are still incomplete; but also because their ambition is to write a close to a body of work that has been created over several years. These very large woodcuts are conceived in the form of the narrative frieze; they have something of the quality of mural paintings. The modelling of the forms is of a subtle simplicity, the compositions tend toward the grand and the colours toward a rich monochrome reinforced by strong highlights. One group recounts the arrest, death and funeral of a young man, caught up as a teenager in rioting and graduating from thence to a Republican grave. In another, a sailor returns to his family, the newborn child, and to images of travel and work. The large watercolours that are associated with these prints depict, amongst the mayhem, the everyday objects of physical life.
These works are important because they assert the persistence of normal life; the characters are not freakish or despairing; nor are the emotions exceptional, though they are deep. Taken altogether they have a sombre dignity. Moreover, the city itself is portrayed as stable it does not disintegrate into shards and fragments like the bleak spaces of 'The Wasteland', nor do walls turn into yards. No staring sphinx is encountered at the end of these streets. The drawing is generally in continuous lines that circumscribe each figure but which links up with the next. Consider for example the funeral scene. It consists of a cumulative and interconnecting network of looping and vigorous cuts which bind all the figures together at the same time as separating them into individuals. It represents community and mutual responsibility but its means, even more than by its imagery. And for the first time, we see places, plainly.
These prints and watercolours have a clear relation to the small linocut that were part of 'No Surrender'; the same soldiers and policeman appear, in the same spare lines, and there is the same willingness to allow for a space that is empty of everything but colour and darkness. The sculpture that stands embracing the city below, it is the same figure that before was being strip-searched and, symbolically, crucified. And there is work. The steel-erectors, shipwrights and builders of the earlier scenes reappear here in the streets of London/Derry, integrated into their life; those things they have made the ships and houses and aircraft - are present and speak of other places and less destructive futures. There is not only life here, but elsewhere. There is a way out of the wasteland.
The narrative character of these woodcuts is that of the ballad - the sequence of four-square, rock-hard images; the overall effect is that of illustrations to an epic. It is a bitter hard story, but it is not all ending in deaths and funerals. There is homecoming and a birth. It concludes with the largest of all Davies' figures who, still waiting to be severed from maternal darkness, reaches out into sound and space.
The large drawings ('Games that People Play', pen and ink) that accompany this exhibition are done in a style that seems to have been developed for the linocuts, reduced to it's barest expression, and have links with the large woodcuts. Forms are traded in energetic outline, with very little attempt to depict surfaces or light. This imparts a sense of monumental proportion even to the smaller features, and the very large scale suggests the terse simplifications involved in mural painting. I shall suggest later in this essay that this ample treatment and plain linearity comes from the artist's desire to move out of the depths of social (and perhaps personal) despair toward a positive vision of the City.
The 'Urban Portraits' (1984) on the other hand, seem to condense from a cloud of tiny marks, scratches and pentimenti; there are few carefully defined profiles, and the forms flow into and out of one another just as the pictorial spaces bend and buckle as in dreams. In this graphic world there is no real hierarchy of lines, any more than there is an order of objects. Anything can be joined to anything else. Streets become walls, night becomes day, and the living sphinx grows out of the turret of a tank; we are not at all surprised to find a man crucified upon a telephone pole, or to find a vanities in the scrap yard. And this fantasia is the product of a needle upon metal.
Lithography however, is a more forgiving medium in which it is possible to have second and third thoughts, and which encourages a floppier kind of drawing. Series such as 'The Great Divide' (1988) in which the world of the DHSS is so unsparingly portrayed, are full of discontinuities and contradictions; fully three-dimensional forms coexist with shadows, figures start in one style to end in another and the only straight lines are those of that portray an architecture of temporary partitions. Such means exactly set forth the meaningless of such places. Most curious of all, areas of tone and the profiles marked out by lines are at a variance with areas of colour.
Colour is always at the edge of irrationality, unpredictable in its communication. I am aware that many people regard Davies as primarily a black-and-white artist, whose adventures into colour have been less successful, and this was a view with which I broadly concurred until, in preparation for writing the essay, I spent a period studying 'The Great Divide'. I discussed his use of colour with the artist, who described colour as a challenge; if it's there, then you have to do something about it. I suspect that Davies began to use colour to extend his general mastery of the print process, and in the early work (such as the 'Rhondda' prints of 1981) there is something arbitrary about the results. I take the burlesque 'Self Portraits' of 1983 as the point in which he achieved a natural and unselfconscious feeling for colour; in those prints he also established a characteristically sharp and personal 'spectrum', full of livid turquoise blues and greens, sharp yellows and a truly nasty line in reds and violets.
In 'The Great Divide', colour plays the leading part and does the work which the drawing does in other series; that is to say, it is the main bearer of the inner meaning, which lies within the working rather than upon the incidents and scenes depicted. There are few distinct colours and coloured areas, instead there is a kind of chromatic fog which obscures the scene as much as reveals it. Take for example No.4, the dominant hue is an institutional green; the sort of colour used on lavatory doors. It permeates both the space and most of the figures and objects within that space; some figures are entirely created out of it, as if they had no other existence, whilst further figures sink or emerge from his miasma by means of small lines or patches of red, yellow and blue. There are sources of light, but the dominant feeling is one of obscurity, because the areas of hue do not correspond with areas of tone. It is not at all clear why there should be those stains of rust and red upon the floor, or why thee barred window should be powder blue (and drawn out of 'normal' perspective) until we have pondered the image for some time. Then we recognise this colour for what it is - boredom visible; and the window becomes one we have looked at for three hours on end. Perhaps only those who have sat upon the metal chairs can know the full force of the half smothered hatred and rage that lies within this and the other prints in the series. For another example, take No.1, in which reds and blues and sandy yellows blend into a haze of dirty violet; this is the hue which encases the emblematic manager who, with argumentative pencil raised, dominates a distant meeting whilst those who are the objects of his management wait and wait. Or the use of blue in No.2, and No.6...or any other example. These colours present us with a hate-filled space. These words are chosen carefully. Where there is no sociality, there is only power; and these spaces are those in which the powerless have to submit.
In each of the print in this series, there is a predominant overall hue. These hues are, in each case, complex colours which are partly created by the mixing and overlaying of inks, and partly by the operations of the retina. The colours bear slight relation to the objects they may be placed against and the relative tone values seem to be arbitrary. The power of the images does not lie in the scenes that are shown, though these are drawn with an unsparing eye; it arises from the deformation of space and form as worked upon by colour. It strikes at us where we are unprotected and expecting pleasure. Colour, which should be a spring of delight, becomes a seepage of disgust and fear, speaking to us of corruption. It is not only social relations that have crumbled, in these scenes; it is the realm of the instincts. Carefully considered, these prints witness to a dissolution of the senses preliminary to death.
Death. I did not expect to use that word but it cannot be avoided. The dissolution of the social world dismembers human life. Dismembers, but does not entirely prevent. At the very bottom of this inferno, where human life appears to leave off, we don't find some imaginary Satan but men and women doing their best in the worst of circumstances; and these figures are linked by an imaginative logic to one another and to others in higher realms.
In the series 'No Surrender', we find a portrait of the most public man of all, the politician, moving up at us out of the darkness. Let us set aside; if we can, our knowledge that this is a portrait of a real politician and concentrate upon the expression and the pose; the accumulated doubt treachery and vulnerability (in about equal proportions), the sense that we get of the betrayed betrayer. Here is a man barely holding on to social existence, yet acting at its very heart and trying to embody it.
'Peter Grimes' is also, we notice, a modern man, inhabiting a fifty hovel which he shares with rats and pin-ups it is only his completely solitary state that prevents him from entering into 'The Wasteland'. He is however, a close cousin to a long series of mad men, and tramps, and winos who wanter about now as main characters, now as figures in the background hardly to be distinguished from the rubbish in which they are sitting. There are several figures in the 'Peter Grimes' album that, with changes, reoccur in 'The Great Divide' and elsewhere.
However, to regard 'Peter Grimes' and 'Self Portraits' as a source of imagery would, I think, misjudge the real case; we are dealing with a typology that is primarily visionary. It has, presumably, a pre-existence which is not in Time, but in imaginative Space. The one figure does not lead on, casually, to the next one, any more than siblings beget one another (though they carry a similar genetic material). This is a genuinely poetic world which like a real city, can be entered by several roads and through which we can walk, discovering new places and people which were there waiting for us all the time. But like a city, this world contains main roads and meeting points.
The series 'Self Portraits' is one such nexus; it is taken up later in 'The Comedy of Life'; the first is a personal/autobiographic, the second is a typical 'socio-graphic', but both function as a sort of rogue's gallery for the rest of the oeuvre.
The advantage to the artist of working in series, is that it helps to focus and develop themes in a consistent way, without the anxiety of wondering what to do next. It provides 'rules of the game' that enable the imagination to move in a free order.
As I understand it, the imagery of toys and military models that appears in the latest drawings, is a beginning of a resolution of this problem.
There is another set of characters which has this radiant function in the work as a whole; I mean the young people in 'Les Misérables' (1984). Two of these images are especially significant; the punkette drinking from a bottle, and the skinhead staring fixedly into the darkness. These, for the first time, combine the history of the art with contemporary subject matter, directly. Above, and apparently (but not certainly) behind the main figures are their emblematic counterparts - the classical reclining nude and the memento mort. The intense darkness and bright luminosity of these small prints gives them a dream-like atmosphere at variance with their ostensible subjects; the halo of bright hair around her face or his profile, the shining insets and the very smallness of the image all combine to give them the status of an icon, each representing one half of a binary system - of negative and positive, of life and death, of female and male, of light and dark, Eros and Thanatos. The radiance in one is the radiance of enthusiasm, in the other, of terror. (There is an analysis of these images by Slavka Sverakova, in the catelogue entitled 'Shore Road, Belfast' to which I am indebted.)
Children. Look through these images and you will find numerous infants, and toddlers, and little boys and girls, held upon knees, strapped into prams, creeping, holding onto furniture, gazing at the adult world as if it was a zoo. His drawing is wonderfully adapted to showing the physicality, the lack of comfort, the frustrations of a little child's life in which straps are too tight, hats too hot, leggings get twisted, drawers droop and nappies are wet. But it is these small citizens who suddenly, as the giant child 'Séan/Billy' inherit the world and The Maiden City, the city of London/Derry is the final location of a sequence of series, the 'master shot' of the script.
Davies is one of a number of artist from mainland Britain who lives and works in Northern Ireland, but it would be a mistake to see his work as being mainly about the North and its horrors. these are only two of his series directly addressed to these 'issues' - 'No Surrender' prints of 1984 and these last images. This is a point to be stressed. Those outside the North who see this exhibition and look at where it has come from, may wish to dismiss the subject matter in the same offhand way they dismiss television reports. Northern Ireland has long served as a sort of psychic dustbin for the rest of the islands - a place where repressed knowledge, let there be no doubt about it, is the recognition of which I wrote earlier; that these images are images of real conditions, widely met with, accurate both as reportage and as symbolic record. Those within the North should resist the tendency to see these prints as exclusively being about their own experience, because the same events take place everywhere and (armed insurrection set aside) the civic conditions of Belfast and Derry are hardly to be distinguished from great tracts of urban life elsewhere. In a number of important respects, they are preferable.
In conversation, the artist told me that the 'Urban Portraits' were about the events of 1984, set down as an imaginary diary; thus they were as much about the Miners' Strike, Greenham Common, and the Iranian war, as about Shore Road. And the series 'Les Misérables' was about autobiographical concerns just as much as it was about punks and skinheads. There are in fact, rather few scenes which are uniquely and specially Northern Irish; but what all have in common is, that they depict conditions of racial inequality. By this I do not mean merely material inequality (though that is enough to contemplate,); I mean those social and psychological conditions that arise when sociality is denied and fraternity ignored.
To live in the North of Ireland may bring no greater understanding of one's immediate environment; indeed, the particular character of our politics become more obscure as one gains an understanding . Insofar as these prints are political, it is Britain and Ireland as a whole that is revealed, since our countries are disputed ground between the last conservative state in Europe and the first ancient regime of the industrial epoch. It brings a peculiar and vivid insight into the City of Evil Government.
To write that is not to describe this, that, or any other policy, party or faction as 'evil', or to ascribe any political intention to the work; but to ask the reader to contemplate these prints and those conditions of which they are a mirror with as much dispassion as Lorenzetti cold depict the idea of Siena, and to transpose the one walled city into another.
The series 'No Surrender' (whose title recalls a siege) is the only directly political series - political in that it describes institutional behaviour, rather than individuals. The images in this group are all small and lack the dense and careful working of other prints. Those of the Orange Order and the July marches are in especially lurid colour; those of terms and army action are in the blackest of blacks. There is a bleakness about this series; the faces are mask-like, the hues infernal; a young boy in a parka and school satchel clasps a petrol bomb. and he and his world are in a saturated scarlet, as red as the blaze he is gleefully contemplating. Two huge dogs lap up some substance from the street; a couple sit at their table almost obliterated by their own bonfire, which seems to have come into their house. A woman undressing looks in her mirror and sees the leering face of a soldier. We become what we hate and we become what we fear.
Of central importance to this group is the portrait of Ian Paisley; or rather, the portrait of The Politician, bearing Paisley's features. I have already described this as the face of a betrayed betrayer; I think we should see the series 'No Surrender' as an insight into fear. How far it should be seen as a group portrait of real working class Protestant fears is not quite clear; my view is that Davies' main interest is in the rendering of the chronic insecurity that begets violence, not specific people. Thus faces are not fully individualised, and colours have become emblematic. I asked Davies why on this occasion, have had shown political symbolism openly. He replied that when every other artist was using pseudo-myth and the oblique statement, he had felt the need for an absolutely direct statement; as direct as a war reporter's camera. "I didn't want to pussy-foot around in this sort of situation." Insofar as this series is a group portrait, it is one of a people who fear they have been made the victims of a sustained confidence trick.
Davies does not, I believe, have anything that could be described as a 'political' postition; but he has at all times an electric sensitivity to the pressure changes of anxiety, fear, boredom, hatred and depression.
These are the passions of the dispossessed; and it follows from his knowledge of them, that he hates the exercise of power over others. But we should also look closely at his soldiers and police figures, to whom he gives the dignity of belonging to a group. Though they are rarely individualised, they are never demeaned. The drawing of these figures is generally monumental and their actions are portrayed as tasks, as work, not as 'oppression', nor even as bullying.
I have left the 'DerryA Tale of Two Cities (1990)' series till last because at the time of writing this, they are still incomplete; but also because their ambition is to write a close to a body of work that has been created over several years. These very large woodcuts are conceived in the form of the narrative frieze; they have something of the quality of mural paintings. The modelling of the forms is of a subtle simplicity, the compositions tend toward the grand and the colours toward a rich monochrome reinforced by strong highlights. One group recounts the arrest, death and funeral of a young man, caught up as a teenager in rioting and graduating from thence to a Republican grave. In another, a sailor returns to his family, the newborn child, and to images of travel and work. The large watercolours that are associated with these prints depict, amongst the mayhem, the everyday objects of physical life.
These works are important because they assert the persistence of normal life; the characters are not freakish or despairing; nor are the emotions exceptional, though they are deep. Taken altogether they have a sombre dignity. Moreover, the city itself is portrayed as stable it does not disintegrate into shards and fragments like the bleak spaces of 'The Wasteland', nor do walls turn into yards. No staring sphinx is encountered at the end of these streets. The drawing is generally in continuous lines that circumscribe each figure but which links up with the next. Consider for example the funeral scene. It consists of a cumulative and interconnecting network of looping and vigorous cuts which bind all the figures together at the same time as separating them into individuals. It represents community and mutual responsibility but its means, even more than by its imagery. And for the first time, we see places, plainly.
These prints and watercolours have a clear relation to the small linocut that were part of 'No Surrender'; the same soldiers and policeman appear, in the same spare lines, and there is the same willingness to allow for a space that is empty of everything but colour and darkness. The sculpture that stands embracing the city below, it is the same figure that before was being strip-searched and, symbolically, crucified. And there is work. The steel-erectors, shipwrights and builders of the earlier scenes reappear here in the streets of London/Derry, integrated into their life; those things they have made the ships and houses and aircraft - are present and speak of other places and less destructive futures. There is not only life here, but elsewhere. There is a way out of the wasteland.
The narrative character of these woodcuts is that of the ballad - the sequence of four-square, rock-hard images; the overall effect is that of illustrations to an epic. It is a bitter hard story, but it is not all ending in deaths and funerals. There is homecoming and a birth. It concludes with the largest of all Davies' figures who, still waiting to be severed from maternal darkness, reaches out into sound and space.