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John Davison
© 2006 all rights reserved

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Kayaking
Na Pali coast. Photo by P.Hopeck
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Background
I live and work on the
island of Kauai, in the island chain of Hawaii. I
have been creating art here since 1978. I have
shown in numerous local exhibitions, as well as
throughout the State of Hawaii. During this time I
have won over twenty-five awards, including twelve
purchases by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture
and the Arts. I was honored to have a painting
included in the inaugural exhibition of the Hawaii
State Art Museum in 2001.
Commissions welcome.
Crating and shipping are available, usually via Fed
Ex. Please contact me regarding artworks or
purchase inquiries.
Currently, on Kauai, my
work can be seen at the Davison Arts gallery in
Kapaa.
Aloha,
John

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Sketching above Na Pali.
Photo by K.Ho
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Artist
Statement
Over the years I have
worked in many mediums including drawing,
printmaking, photography, and sculpture, but mainly
I have painted with watercolor and acrylic on paper
or canvas.
The primary inspiration for
my paintings has always been the incredible beauty
and power of the Kauai "islandscape." I try,
however, to do more than just mimic the look of a
place. I want to get beyond the surface visuals and
express the intangibles of emotion, spirit, and
mystery that I sense in this landscape. There is a
magic and poetry of sea and stone and sky that I am
looking for. I want to know the way a tree grows,
experience the quiet knowledge of time accumulated
by an ancient stone, and feel the forces that
carved these deep canyons. These landscapes become
reflections of my own spirit and existence. They
are places of growth and erosion, movement and
stillness, darkness and light. They are places of
mystery and discovery.
I work in the studio from
memory and sketches done on location. I prefer to
do my final work in the studio where impressions,
remembrance, and imagination can play a larger
role. Looking at my sketches I return to these
places, and so much comes back to me as I paint,
much more than just the visual. For me the
paintings become more focused and honed to their
basic essence. They have greater meaning for me, I
think, than if I had painted them on the spot. I
like to think of my paintings as being, at once,
realistic, impressionistic, abstracted, and
imagined. I hope they resonate a kind of visual
poetry.
Some pieces are very
site-specific, while others are imagined and
abstracted becoming archetypal landscapes that
hopefully speak for many such ridges, valleys, and
coastlines. I have painted a wide range of island
landscapes, including a series on the eroded
patterns of Waimea Canyon and another on the
forests and stones of Nounou Mountain, known as the
"Sleeping Giant," beneath which I lived for fifteen
years. Much of my recent work has been inspired by
the raincarved ridges of Waialeale and Makaleha
surrounding my home, and especially by time spent
kayaking and hiking along Kauai's rugged Na Pali
coast.
For more on "how" a
painting is made see a work in progress.
My
sculptures are an outlet for the more whimsical
side of my creative personality reflecting on my
relationship to nature, family, and life in
general.
OK, enough words from
me. If you have made it this far you might be
interested in what some others have said about my
work. See below.
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Reviews
"...Davison has pushed
into the reaches of color abstraction in seeking
out not just the surface of nature but its deepest
structure. The color - symbolic, even thermographic
rather than naturalistic - seems to respond to a
logic of levels of energy felt or perceived in
rocks, sky, water. (He) is particularly successful
at fusing a sense of expanded space with an overlay
of essential forms, and much of this has to do with
being in tune with some archetypal formal rhythms.
Davison's watercolors display a delight in the very
shapes of color, revealing a deep-reaching pleasure
in patterns - light broken by the shimmer of water,
old striations of earth strata, thoughtful
conjunctions of stones."
Marcia Morse, Honolulu Advertiser,
8/21/88
"These paintings are
hypnotic in their effect, reaching to a deep level
within the viewer - a visual metaphor for a
protected inner place of beauty and
sanctity..."
Dawn
Fraser Kawahara, Garden Island newspaper,
8/19/88
"The jewel-like quality
portrayed by Davison is deeply honoring of the
spirit of the island, while transporting one,
almost viscerally, to the location real or
imagined."
Jennifer Roberts, Garden Island
newspaper, 10/23/91
"John captures the
monumentality of geological time with the great
boulder blocks of color that form the masonry of
his paintings. These color swaths jostle and
streak, skim and glide, nudge up against each other
and define the strong contrasts that nature
provides."
Evelyn de Buhr, Kauai Magazine,
Spring '94
"John Davison's daring
abstract watercolors and acrylics capture the
panoramic beauty, power, and mystery of Kauai, the
contrasts of rain and sun, mountains and clouds,
the finite way light touches and transforms all
facets of earth's objects, and the patterns and
processes of growth and change, interaction and
erosion, evident in nature."
Arnold Schuchter, Art and Crafts in
the Hawaiian Islands, 1991
Mahalo for these
beautiful and positive comments on my art. For some
negative reviews click here... Just kidding! Fortunately, my
critics have mostly kept their opinions to
themselves and out of general circulation.-
JD
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Contact
Information
e-mail:

Phone/fax: 808-822-7179
Gallery: 808-821-8022
P.O. Box 959, Kapaa, HI
(USA) 96746
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