Colin Davidson: Twelve Paintings – A rich study of one of Ireland’s great contemporary artists – The Irish Times

The last time I was in London I saw the crowd queuing in Trafalgar Square to see the Van Goghs and ducked around the back to the peace of the National Portrait Gallery. This lesser-visited province of Britain’s visual history is the dominion of Holbein and van Dyck, of privilege and grandeur.

That day Colin Davidson’s Silent Testimony was on show, the corridors of watchful eyes giving way to 18 portraits of individuals whose lives were affected by the Troubles. I had seen the paintings before in Belfast, but there in London, I cried, the gathering of lines and colours a gentle storm in the exhibition room. The art of Silent Testimony is its own ethical alchemy, and suggests the dimensions of Davidson’s gift, which is to create a shared landscape of feeling from the fragments of history, place, and each worn face.

That gift is explored throughout Twelve Paintings, which is a study of Davidson’s art from the beginning to the present, with a thoughtful foreword by the actor Simon Callow. The spine of the book is Davidson’s conversations with the journalist and critic Mark Carruthers, who draws the artist out with sympathetic awareness. This is careful work, and beautifully done, as together the two establish a pattern of practice from the paintings, sketches, models and photographs that makes Twelve Paintings a rich and inspiring document of one of Ireland’s great contemporary artists.

[ Colin Davidson on his powerful portraits and urban scenesOpens in new window ]

For all that Davidson is best known for painting some of the world’s most famous people, the book has many surprises. Up close, the Portrait of Ed Sheeran wears the red and green of a heather bed. Woodvale Cricket Club from Black Mountain looks briefly like one of Monet’s water-lily paintings, the brighter space of the pitch a patch of light by water. Davidson’s work frequently foreshortens the horizontal to make the vertical rise, the painter perched as if on some Giverny bridge. This is the effect of Self-Portrait (Conduit Street, London), which makes the flat surface of a shop window broil with submerged colour.

In Milkman, Anna Burns mourned a society in the North that couldn’t live with such light. In Twelve Portraits luminosity has a frame and language, the future finally arrived, various and alive.