Twelve Paintings is a timely exploration of the life and work of the renowned Irish artist Colin Davidson.
Structured as a series of conversations with broadcaster and arts advocate Mark Carruthers, this handsome book is anchored to 12 key works from the artist’s vast oeuvre. Each acts as a gateway to a wider exploration of the artist’s life and work.
The book opens with the painting ‘Derelict Belfast Street’, a gouache on paper from 1986. The detailed introduction tells us that Davidson is ‘a uniquely Northern Irish painter’ whose life was deeply touched by the three decades of The Troubles.
This was also the subject of his highly moving exhibition earlier this year at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Davidson says he made this painting in his late teens when streets and communities in Belfast ‘were just left to rot and decay and fall back into nature again’. Here in the first conversation he makes a thoughtful observation about the synergy between landscape painting and portraiture – two crafts that traditionally seem much removed from one another.
‘When I’m making portrait paintings I’m looking at the creases and marks that are left, that the experiences of life etches onto a face. It’s the same thing here. It’s the etching and the marks and the scars that are left through life, and I suppose I was looking at buildings in the sense that I was making a portrait.’
The second chapter is also based on a landscape, ‘Looking over Belfast from Castlereagh’ painted in 2017. Although he no longer lives in Belfast, Davidson returns to the city each year to paint, saying ‘I feel part of the landscape’. The Belfast landscapes illustrated in this section show his talent for both the figurative and the more abstract style of painting.
From here, the book focuses on portraits, including two chapters anchored on very different self-portraits.
The first of these ‘Self-Portrait (Conduit Street, London)’ is one of Davidson’s ‘window paintings’ where the subject is seen reflected in the glass. Fourteen of these large-scale works were featured in a Sotheby’s exhibition in 2023.
Even though he’d been an artist for some 40 years by this stage, he says: ‘I was discovering an awful lot about how the paint could work, without overly thinking about why.’
He doesn’t see the art of portraiture as being simply to present a likeness of the person, saying a portrait can be ‘a quarrying, a digging, an uncovering or an unmasking.’ Indeed, he says he likes ‘turning all of that on its head and poking a bit of fun at it, questioning it’.
A particularly fun one here is ‘Self-Portrait (Great Portland Street, London) #2’ with a photograph of the late Queen reflected in the window, along with the streetscape and the artist himself. If I could own one picture from this book, this would be the one.
Chapter 9 is devoted to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the portrait Davidson made of her in 2016. In this conversation he talks about that ‘significant moment in time’ in politics and the relations between England and Ireland.
He also shares some of the background behind his invitation to paint the Queen and the process involved. He was invited to tour Buckingham Palace and choose the setting he wanted for the sitting – he picked the Yellow Drawing Room.
There are many insights here into the craft and technical skills required for portrait painting. He says ‘making a portrait can be an intensely exhausting venture’ and ‘a lot of the painting process is looking’. Some of his sculptural works are also featured and the book ends with a haunting picture of the artist’s own head in a wooden box.
Many people may be drawn to this book for its famous faces – including Ed Sheeran, Bono, and Bill Clinton – and lush illustrations but it’s really these thoughts on art that make it such a joy. It is through Davidson’s broader reflections on the role of art, on memory and place, that we see something of his unique creative process and the powerful human stories behind his work.
There is also an engaging foreword by actor and friend Simon Callow.
Twelve Paintings meanders through personal memoir and artistic manifesto in these very real conversations and offers some meaningful insights into the practice of one of Ireland’s most important contemporary artists.
Davidson reveals not only the technical and emotional depth behind his work but also his personal convictions about creativity, identity and the role of the artist in bearing witness. It has been said that Colin Davidson is an artist for our times and this book is worthy testament to that accolade. Highly recommended.
