Essays
War. What Is It Good For?
More than a year on, and words and statistics start to feel meaningless in the attempt to quantify the impact of this war.
When hundreds of thousands have died, when millions of lives have been torpedoed off course, what difference does an updated figure of loss from the United Nations make?
This war has already redefined generations to come, not just in Ukraine, but across the world...
The Epistle according to Saint Anthony
Saint Anthony was a Portuguese Franciscan Friar, canonised in 1232, the year after his death, and known for his compassion for those suffering poverty or ill health. He is the Patron Saint specifically for lost people and things. It is no wonder that Anthony Davies has, in titling his series of linocuts, linked his own role as an artist to his sanctified namesake.
Kaimanawa Horses – Behind the Image
What’s behind an image? What’s beyond appearances? Behind a painting or a print?
Nothing more than the wall on which it hangs. That seems reasonable - logical. How is it then, that Anthony Davies' Kaimanawa Horses series of 20 prints - generate such a profound emotional impact?
On the surface they are pictures of hoses - doomed, dying or dead. Using a combination of etching and aquatint, Davies obtains subtle tonal effects - greys along with black and white - and remarkable textural variety. The images derive from a television documentary; the selected frames were screened onto a zinc plate to be etched, and tonally manipulated and enhanced using the aquatint technique...
Closing The Gap Exhibition
Anthony Davies is intimately connected to the tradition of printmaking. His work recalls the European men who turned the printing press into a tool for the production of fine art.
In particular, the Frenchman Honore Daumier (1808-1879) is relevant. His lithographs were social commentary, often focusing on political life. He was also interested in the fate of the common man, and these collective concerns emerge nearly two centuries later in limited edition fine art prints created by Davies, whose recent body of work investigates the goings on in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The Epistle according to Saint Anthony – Artspost
Saint Anthony, Portuguese Catholic friar of the Franciscan order, was said to have preached to the fish after being given the cold shoulder by a bunch of heretics back in the 13th century. Shoals of them were reputed to have gathered at the mouth of a river in Portugal to hear the saint preach his message, probably on the life and times of Christ.
I Print Therefore I Am: Anthony Davies Printmaker
There is paradox inherent in the process of printmaking when it acts as a vehicle of social and political commentary. The very nature of the print facilitates the distribution of commentary, yet also intrudes upon the directness of the description and reception of the message, when technical issues may seem to dominate over content...
Energy Of Outrage, Anthony Davies Camouflage: With Attitude I-V
Anthony Davies completed and exhibited his screenprint series ‘Camouflage: With Attitude’. Nos. 1 – 10 in 2004-05, with Nos. I – V following several months later. It is as if he was still be nagged by ‘Camouflage’ and needed, as Sir Edmund Hillary has remarked, to “knock the bugger off”. The final (we presume) five prints, then, are the summing up, the loaded dregs, the necessary essence of an intense outpouring...
Crossroads: A Family Portrait
"I'm a printmaker," states Anthony Davies. "I've got it tattooed across my forehead." He goes on to say.
"Printmaking...is basically quite a boring medium," he says, and and thus proceeds according to a logic designed to keep himself - and his viewers - interested. He is continually looking to expand the reach of printmaking and to open out its potential. "I suppose what I am trying to do in my work a lot of the time is to reinvent myself...it's a mass of contradictions."
Anthony Davies: Apocalypse Now
The art of Anthony Davies has always been political. He responds to the world he sees around him. Apocalypse Now is a series of works made during 2011-12, registering the impact of a range of calamitous events, such as the Christchurch earthquakes and the Rena Disaster here in New Zealand, and overseas the carnage of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and the damage created subsequently by the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Re-Invented Architecture: Anthony Davies' Utopia
Images of rural, provincial New Zealand have dominated much of Anthony Davies' work since the late 1990's. In Utopia, he turns his attention to the city. Well, perhaps Christchurch was hardly a city in international terms before the 2011 Earthquake, let alone afterwards. But it's very clear, from the drawn buildings and street plan sketches that sprawl across the surfaces of Davies' new prints, that he is interested in the urban landscape.
Foreword To The Ten Years After Catalogue
During his decade in New Zealand, Anthony Davies has accumulated not so much a following, as an intellectual entourage. His work also has the power to provoke visceral reactions in viewers, and it is this mind/body interplay which makes his work so compelling. Those with whom he comes into contact do not forget their encounters with this alien in their midst.
Ten Years After
Anthony Davies was born in Hampshire, England, in 1947, the eldest of five children. Rationing was still in place. Davies said "We were very aware of having one pair of shoes a year, a new pair of trousers for winter, and shorts in the summer. We had a television, but it was only turned on for a certain time - we had homework to do...we had books around, we played in the garden...I think it all starts with your parents and what they lead you to."
Extracts From A Tale Of Two Cities
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.
Anthony Davies
LC: How political is your work?
AD: I think it is political in as much as political events affect the day to day living of most people. Three of my print series are 'political' in this sense: Urban Portrait, Les Misérables, and The Wasteland. The general theme is 'post-punk', the alienation of both the young and unqualified, the old and frail, urban decay resulting in homelessness, violence and social upheaval. They covered the Miners' Strike, Greenham Common, and the various racial flash points in the early '80s, Toxteth, St Paul's and Brixton.
The Bite Of The Print: A Graphic Reality
In a sense all art, for as long as it has been made, has dealt with the human situation, and artists have successfully communicated their thoughts and ideas through their artefacts, sometimes across thousands of years.
And yet, when Anthony Davies said he is "completely preoccupied" with it, he means just that.
His work deals consciously and directly with the disadvantaged and vulnerable members of our society, the ones why are surviving, defiantly: against the odds, or buckling under the strain, submitting to the situation they find themselves in.
Anthony Davies In Conversation With Belinda Loftus
BL: Cities have almost entirely dominated your prints in recent years. Why do you think that has happened?
AD: I don't know really, because my background is very rural. I'm basically a country boy from the South of England. My mother's relatives were all landowners. I think in a strange sort of way, I'd have almost liked to become a farmer and because I didn't inherit the land, I seemed to rebel completely against that. I enjoy the countryside, but I've got no interest in doing prints of it, though it is starting to creep in a bit, with views.
But my work at present is basically about a city, and a city like Cardiff and Belfast that one can walk around.
I think it's to do with the squalor as well, which is another odd thing. I mean it's something I didn't experience in my childhood, or even when I was growing up - I lived in a market town. I like the city because it's alive, I like streets, and buildings, and take-away Chinese, and building sites, and shop windows. It seems to be about life, it's about the consumer, it's about everybody. I get slightly upset with reviews you know "the life of Hell" I don't know that it's really about that.