The Devonport Flagstaff Page 16
December 4, 2015
Devonport skatepark truly is a work of art Devonport painter James Davidson pays homage to monuments of urban youth culture in his first solo show, Skate Park. Davidson has painted the Ngataringa skatepark more than a dozen times, because he sees beauty in its concrete assembly of ramps, halfpipes and pyramid. “I am interested in their sculptural and monumental qualities, shapes and curves because they lend themselves to abstraction,” he says. He was inspired while walking his dog across Ngataringa Park one morning two years ago. “So I went back to photograph it in the morning and evening when no one was there, without people. I think the emptiness has a transcendent quality to it,” he says. Davidson is not interested in skateboarding. “I’d fall off immediately,” he says. Ngataringa is the only skatepark he has visited. Others, including one in the US, he has looked at online. He pulls up the photo images on his computer screen and makes several sketches, before he puts acrylic paint on canvas. “I start out with architectural lines that help with the construction of the image. I ended up liking the lines so much that I left quite a few of them in the finished painting,” he says. Skate Park is part of Davidson’s transition from realistic to more abstract painting. “I have gone through several stages in my work, and since I came to New Zealand, I have been doing more and more abstract work, exploring the quality of paint rather than an object,” he says. Davidson arrived in Devonport from Cape Town, South Africa, 14 years ago. The semi-retired Auckland Hospital pathologist started painting as a hobby in
From concrete to canvas… Ngataringa Skatepark 1985, taking evening and weekend classes at Cape Town’s Ruth Prowse School of Art. It wasn’t a huge leap for him. “Painting was a language I understood from an early age. My mother was a painter and I was always surrounded by paintings and books about paintings,” he says.
“In the last five years I have gotten more and more serious about it. Now it’s my second career, and my main activity apart from walking the dog, going to movies and listening to jazz,” he says. The walls of Davidson’s house are covered in art, much of it his mother’s or his own. Five years ago,
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