Martin Davis

Painting is a kind of ecstasy to me; an intense & personal struggle to bring to life on canvas a private world of accumulated memory & images. It is often quite exhausting, but cathartic at one and the same time. It calms my soul.

The drive to create work is my emotional response to colour, my love of form and to the effects on both of light & atmosphere. Specific subject matter is less important so my work can be quite diverse and wide ranging. But at the heart of what I do, like a thread running through all my artwork, is a fascination with the essence and idea of boundaries in visual imagery - and how they divide and define the shapes and forms in the world that we see.

The inspiration for specific paintings often arise from images (and even words and phrases, or poetry) in current affairs and the world around me. This is especially so if they strike a chord with my own past or trigger distant personal memories.

I try to use my sense of colour and love of form to raise the spirits. One of my abiding hopes is that, like music, art can serve to engender a greater sense of wellbeing - in observer and creator alike. I believe that at its best it can be a simple, joyful experience as well as a vehicle for asking more fundamental questions about human experience.