Twelve Paintings Colin Davidson
Mark Carruthers is one of Northern Ireland’s best known and most respected broadcasters. He joined BBC Northern Ireland in 1989 and now presents several well-established political programmes on television and radio, including The View, Sunday Politics and Red Lines. Mark studied political science at Queen’s University Belfast, graduating in 1987. In 1989 he was awarded a Master’s degree in Irish politics. He received an honorary doctorate (DLit) from Queen’s in 2019 and is currently Visiting Professor of Media at Ulster University.
Beyond politics, Mark is a passionate advocate of the arts. He served on the board of the Lyric Theatre in Belfast for almost fourteen years – eight of them as chairman – and was a leading figure in the successful campaign to rebuild the theatre at a cost of over eighteen million pounds. He also served for many years as chairman of Tinderbox Theatre Company and sat on the board of the Old Museum Arts Centre. In 2011 he was awarded an OBE for services to the arts in Northern Ireland.
His previous publications include Stepping Stones: The Arts in Ulster 1971–2001, co-edited with Stephen Douds and published by Blackstaff Press in 2001, and Alternative Ulsters: Conversations on Identity, published by Liberties Press in 2013.
Colin Davidson
Twelve Paintings
conversations with Mark Carruthers
Foreword
Simon Callow
Sitting for a portrait is an immensely intimate experience. Clothed or unclothed, one is utterly naked. Nobody looks at you the way a portraitist does, except perhaps your mother, your lover or your doctor. In each case, the purpose is the same: penetration of the surface. What’s going on inside you? When I sat for Colin, I was rehearsing a play, heavily pregnant, as rehearsing actors are, with the character – or rather, in this particular case, the characters, plural. I was wrestling with Matthew Hurt’s extraordinary The Man Jesus, in which I was playing sixteen different people, starting with the pregnant Mary and taking in among others, en route to Calvary, John the Baptist, sundry apostles, Judas, Herod, Pontius Pilate and Mary Magdalene. Little of this, I’m sure, was visible from the outside, but when he showed me the portrait, it was filled – swarming – with inner life. A little while later I wrote of Colin and his portraits, a selection of which were on view in the foyer of the Lyric in Belfast: ‘He told me he had been a landscape painter by trade until he came to portraiture. That made sense. Those faces were part of a landscape, the landscape of a particular mind-set, a bodily vernacular, a facial terrain. And the paint itself, the physicality of it, created a sort of physiognomic topography, pits and craters and ridges. A facescape, you might say.’ opposite
vii Foreword
Portrait of Simon Callow (detail) 2013 oil on canvas 127 x 117 cm
We didn’t talk much during the session, but I felt I knew him – that we knew each other, in a curiously intimate, no words necessary sort of a way. Once when we happened to be in Belfast at the same time, I took him to a lunchtime concert given by the Ulster Orchestra. He sat next to me and I was aware of a huge concentration emanating from him. I turned round and found him listening with his eyes. He later, after that visit, sent me an exquisite crayon sketch of Queen’s University, an institution I attended for just one year, 1968–69, an epoch-making year both for me and rather more so for Ulster. It is a place I love and to which I owe a great deal, even though I ran away from it to become an actor. By the same alchemy with which Colin’s portraits capture the face and what lies behind it, in the drawing of Queen’s he has somehow managed to catch what the place meant and means to me.
Some time passed without my seeing him. Out of the blue, he texted me to tell me that there was an exhibition of his work – Silent Testimony – at the National Portrait Gallery which he’d like me to see. I went as soon as I could, not quite sure what to expect. What I saw that afternoon overwhelmed me. It was unlike anything I’d seen before, certainly unlike anything of Colin’s. I texted him immediately:
viii Foreword
My dear Colin, I finally caught Silent Testimony on Tuesday. God knows what I was expecting, but it hit me with overwhelming force. Not having read anything about it, or even referred to the captions, I was instantly shaken by the intensity of the sitters caught in your passionate brushwork, and then became aware of – deeply moved by – the eyes, the dark reflection in the eyes, always the still centre of each canvas, gazing on the unthinkable, the unfathomable, the unbearable. Then I read the captions, which took me back to ’68/’69, when I was at Queen’s and it was all brewing, and then to ’74, when I came back with the Edinburgh Traverse theatre company and we played at the Arts Theatre as the bombs erupted all over the city and the tanks were rolling down Botanic Avenue, and then later that same day met my old chums from Queen’s, who, quietly, emotionlessly, spoke of what had happened to them and their families, the cumulative horror of it all. And standing there in the NPG, with just a couple of others in that cube of a room, I found myself suddenly shaking with emotion, welling with tears, sobbing, reliving the whole ghastly history, which is now being repeated all over the world every day of our lives. Well: thank you for reawakening my numbed humanity. It’s a magnificent show. As you know, one reaches it via the Elizabethan monarchs, aristocrats, soldiers in the Long Gallery, and I thought as I left your room, that they too had known all the above, they too were standing on the tombs of family, friends, lovers, and the whole hideous pageant continues, but that you and Holbein and co in painting them somehow manage to heal us in some mysterious way. Bravo, my friend, congratulations and salutations. You have created something truly unforgettable, indelible. A thousand thanks, Simon.
I thought I knew Colin. I didn’t.
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Introduction
Mark Carruthers
He calls it ‘the act of looking’. Colin Davidson sees the world through an artist’s eyes and in Twelve Paintings he explains how and why he does what he does. A painter long admired in his native Ireland, Colin now enjoys a burgeoning international reputation. His work features in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the Ulster Museum in Belfast, and in many private and corporate collections. In his practice he is a restless perfectionist whose work ranges from portraiture through landscape to three-dimensional painting. His outsized head paintings of prominent cultural and political figures vie for attention with his vast window reflections and his Belfast cityscapes. Silent Testimony, his series of portraits of people united by their loss during Northern Ireland’s many years of conflict, has inspired and unsettled audiences from Derry to London and Dublin to New York. This huge body of work, built up over decades of dedicated endeavour, is what we set out to explore, together, in this series of twelve face-to-face conversations.
The opportunity to discuss all aspects of Colin’s practice in this book – and to illustrate them comprehensively – has enabled us to produce a unique overview of artistic output. Colin and I have been firm friends for more than fifteen years and Twelve Paintings has
1 Introduction
opposite
Portrait of Mark Carruthers
been a joint enterprise since its inception. We were introduced by a mutual friend when I was chairing the board of Belfast’s Lyric Theatre and Colin had just begun to experiment with his now familiar larger-than-life portraits. The walls of the newly rebuilt Lyric quickly became a favoured place for him to hang his ever-expanding series. Some years later I approached him with the idea of publishing a book of interviews exploring both his work and his world view, and he signed up without hesitation. Providing a platform for Colin to set out his thoughts in book form was, in truth, no more than an extension of what we had already found ourselves doing at various festivals and literary events. It was obvious in those encounters the extent to which audiences were as fascinated by the insights he provided into his working practices as they were by his views on art and its place in our world.
The premise for this publication is a simple one: a dozen discrete conversations, each focusing on a specific piece of Colin’s work, which, in turn, serve as entry points into wider explorations of his craft. Hence, our interview about Colin’s portrait of Seamus Heaney leads into a conversation that also touches on his encounters with Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Edna O’Brien. Similarly, the Duke Special portrait opens up a discussion that brings in, amongst others, Brian Friel, Kenneth Branagh and Liam Neeson. While some of Colin’s portraits may have attracted attention because of the visibility of those who have sat for him, he nevertheless rejects any suggestion that he is a ‘celebrity’ painter. The late Queen Elizabeth II, President Bill Clinton and Ed Sheeran may feature prominently in his body of work, but he is quick to emphasise what he sees as the democracy of painting portraits. His process for capturing the likeness and the personality of his subjects does not differ in any meaningful way from sitter to sitter. The pigment he puts on the cloth and how he does it, he maintains, is the same if he is painting a head of state or a little-known, up-and-coming poet.
In fact, Colin Davidson does not regard himself as a portrait painter at all. He sees elements of landscape painting in his portraits, and portraiture in his much-admired Belfast landscapes. His work is a constantly evolving mix of ideas and genres. Always on the lookout
for the next challenge, he admits in these encounters to getting bored easily and maintains he is at his most productive when forced out of his comfort zone. He insists he is rarely completely satisfied with what he produces. Willem de Kooning, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Basil Blackshaw may be among his many artistic heroes, but this is an artist whose focus is fixed firmly on exploring and developing his own singular voice, and tackling his uniquely personal artistic challenges.
Colin Davidson’s imagination is what drives his expression. His artistic output speaks for itself, but these dozen conversations – each of them, I hope, engaging, heartfelt and candid – reveal an artist who thinks deeply about his role and is confident making the case for its value. In my day job I am paid to talk to people. Holding decisionmakers to account on behalf of the public is a large part of what I do. This project, however, required a very different approach. As a facilitator, my task was to tease out answers and encourage reflection, and, of course, our friendship underpinned the mechanics of the interview process. My overarching concern throughout was a simple one – to ensure Colin’s voice is properly heard.
Our interviews took place over many months and the book itself has been several years in gestation. Translating lengthy sitdown interviews into readable text is time-consuming and does unavoidably require surgery, but edits, where necessary, were always made to provide clarity and ensure accuracy. I am confident the authenticity and the liveliness of our encounters remains intact in these published versions of our conversations.
Colin Davidson is a uniquely Northern Irish painter and his sense of himself is not something he shies away from confronting in this book. His reflections on Northern Ireland’s three decades of Troubles – the backdrop to his early life in Belfast – are informed by his astute grasp of place and identity in what remains a visibly divided society. Conscious, too, of the Irish and British dimensions to his identity, he is a painter who is keenly attuned politically, something which is particularly evident when he is discussing his encounter with the late Queen and his highly charged Silent Testimony series of paintings. It is
3 Introduction
also apparent when he reflects on making his portraits of politicians –Senator Mitchell, President Clinton, Ian Paisley, Martin McGuinness, John Hume and David Trimble in particular. His observations on those encounters are sharp and insightful but never self-absorbed. We are familiar in this place with public figures who excel at conviction politics; the more convinced they are of their cause, the louder they tend to expound upon it. Not so Colin Davidson.
One key challenge we did have to confront during the project was striking the appropriate balance between sharing relevant insights from Colin’s sitters without feeling we were breaching anyone’s confidence. When the Queen sat for him in Buckingham Palace in May 2016, it was the first Northern Irish portrait of a British monarch, painted at a time when Anglo-Irish relations were at a historical highpoint. The conversation in the Yellow Drawing Room flowed freely. Much of what was said between the two protagonists in that encounter remains – and will remain – private to them, but there is still ample detail in our discussion about that sitting to shed light on the persona of the late monarch without crossing the line into intrusiveness.
Silent Testimony is another case in point. Colin describes it in our conversation as his most meaningful and most personal piece of work. He says painting the eighteen victims of the Troubles who make up the series required him to stretch himself beyond anything he had done before. The stories of loss he encountered when making those paintings back in 2014 and 2015 clearly had a profound effect on him. So moved was he by what he heard, in fact, that he decided afterwards to become a visible and forthright advocate for victims. I suggested we should record that interview not in his studio, as we had most of the others, but surrounded by the paintings in the National Portrait Gallery in London on the final weekend that the exhibition was being shown there in early 2025. It was an intensely moving experience for both of us. Colin speaks with great clarity about meeting and painting the individuals who feature in Silent Testimony, careful always to acknowledge and respect the burden of loss they were carrying with them during those sittings.
While Colin’s distinctive portraits are the most recognised and celebrated aspects of his practice internationally, his Belfast cityscapes, window reflections, drawings and 3D paintings are also important elements of his output. Appreciating why he returns every year to make at least one large painting of his home city is to begin to understand his essential sense of place. Hearing him talk through the complexities of capturing reflected and refracted light in his window paintings is revelatory, as are his insights into the foundational importance of drawing and his current explorations into the world of 3D painting. The human connections wrapped up in all of that work are what matter most to Colin, and that must be a factor in what has increasingly led to him being cast in the dual role of public conscience and chronicler of our time.
On the basis that, for the purposes of this book, Colin’s thinking matters as much as the work he is discussing, we both agreed from the outset that the text of the interviews should be given the same weight as the illustrations. The conversations link many of the individual pieces he has produced with the experiences that went into making them, though we were clear our task was not to produce anything resembling a definitive career review. How could it be that, anyway, when the artist still has, potentially, so many years of endeavour ahead of him? However, I hope it is a timely stocktake, and that our conversations reflect that.
The themes that punched through during the course of our conversations came as no great surprise to either of us. It is clear, for example, that the home Colin grew up in and the childhood he experienced shaped significantly the artist he went on to become. The seminal moment when he first realised at the age of eight that he had a talent for drawing continues to influence his approach to this day. His time at art college and the years he spent working as a graphic designer are also writ large in the narrative of his artistic development. He mentions on several occasions – and with gratitude – the serendipitous encounters in recent years that linked sitters and opened doors to career-changing opportunities.
Finally, the idea that comes around most frequently in our conversations is the notion that, as an artist, he needs the viewer to feel there is a gap in his work that he or she can fill. At its simplest, the great skill of Colin Davidson is his ability to place before us material that invites us to engage. Our participation, he is convinced, is required to complete any piece of art. It is an invitation from him to share in the moment. The art critic Kelly Grovier, in an essay published in the catalogue that accompanied the successful retrospective of Colin’s work at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery in Banbridge in 2022, says this: ‘Davidson knows that the specific details of any given painting, its scale and texture, genre and palette, are ultimately incidental to his larger aim: to glimpse through the myth of pigment and linen what it means to be here – to be alive in the world.’
Colin Davidson has a rare ability to find a voice for his subjects –whether those subjects be people, places or plate-glass windows – in paint. This book of interviews quite rightly celebrates that work, but it is also an opportunity for the artist to raise his voice and speak for himself, this time not in paint but in print.
1
1 Derelict Belfast Street
What is the significance for you now of this early painting?
This still remains an important painting for me personally. It’s been torn, it’s been rolled so many times, it’s been stored in roof spaces –and, in fact, it was only framed for the first time for the retrospective exhibition at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery in Banbridge in 2022.
I made this painting when I was in my late teens and it depicts a Belfast which I saw and knew of. Not that I lived in these derelict streets, but I was very aware of them being bricked up with breezeblocks and then being left because the developers weren’t moving in at the same pace that they would now. Streets and communities were just left to rot and decay and fall back into nature again. You got trees sprouting up through the middle of a house that had lost its roof. It was part and parcel, I suppose, of growing up during the dark days here. I think for the first time I realised that you could explore a building through painting it – almost looking at something man-made as a portrait, in a way.
There’s a history in that painting. When I’m making portrait paintings I’m looking at the creases and marks that are left, that the experience 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. this spread
I was drawn to that building in the mid ground. I remember when I was painting it I was seeing the windows almost like eyes. I was really exploring the fact that, miraculously, this two-dimensional plane can give the illusion of three-dimensionality. We’ve got a background with mystery around the corner; we’ve got the mid ground with the row of terraces that I just talked about and then we’ve got a foreground –almost like a stage set – where, on either side, we’re being led into it. I was exploring so much in this painting. But why it’s important to me now is that I still continue to this day to paint Belfast. I get on high viewpoints from Black Mountain, the Castlereagh Hills, the roofs of buildings, looking at the city from a bird’s-eye view – and this was the beginning. I’ve been painting Belfast since my teens. This was 1986.
Do you think of it as a bleak piece? It’s a street where the people have been driven out – and yet, is there also perhaps a resilience in the painting?
You see, what is fascinating about your interpretation of the painting, Mark, is that in a sense you are explaining for us all what art does. You are looking at something that was painted nearly forty years ago and you are interpreting it in your own way. It’s essentially just pigment on a bit of card, but you’re looking at that and you’re able to walk into it and you’re able to complete it in some ways. Some people may not see what you see – but you are correct. I’m not sure what I set out to achieve in particular, but it is quite bleak. These are houses where there would have been kids playing out in the street but who are no longer there.
One of the other key aspects to it is there’s no play of light in the painting. The light is completely flat. You’re not aware of any sunlight coming from the corner to add a highlight in any particular part of it. So, in some ways, there is a bleakness, though I can’t say that that’s what I set out to achieve. I set out to paint what I knew and what I saw and you are, in some ways, as the viewer, filling in the gaps.
Do you know specifically where the street is?
Yes, it was around the Dublin Road area. If you remember before the link road between Great Victoria Street and the Dublin Road came into existence, there was a whole community of houses there. Of course, you’ve got the ubiquitous Belfast puff of smoke in the background and the gasometer at the gasworks, which was very obvious on the Belfast skyline in those days.
When you look at the painting now, almost four decades on – and from the perspective of an accomplished painter – how do you see it?
There is a naivety to the painting. I look now at the way that I’ve painted the bricks. I’ve attempted to give the illusion of space and there is the obvious touch of an artist who is exploring and who doesn’t really know how to paint. I can see the marks left behind which tell me that. That said, I stand by everything that I do and everything that I did. Not all of the work that we make we like. In fact, I look back now at some of the work that I made in the past and I cringe from time to time that it was so unaccomplished, but that’s part of the process. That’s part of the journey that I took to get where I am now and I might well look back in a few years’ time at what I’m doing now and cringe as well. I’ve no idea. But we can only be true to ourselves at that particular moment in time. And what I do know is that when I did this painting I was being true to myself.
Can we go right back to the very beginning and talk about your earliest recollection of being able to draw or paint? You and I have talked before about a drawing you did of a farmhouse when you were very young. Why do you remember that piece in particular?
I was in a class in Finaghy Primary School and I remember one afternoon we were doing art. All of the art materials were out –coloured pencils and crayons – and we were all just drawing from our imaginations. And I remember, you’re quite right, doing a drawing of a little farmhouse with trees in the background. I can remember the mountains. I can remember drawing a picket fence and a pathway
through the garden to the front door. And I remember shocking myself with the drawing. I sort of wondered where it had come from, because the drawing was good. It was certainly good for an eightyear-old child. And then the class and the teacher came around to look at it and they were all shocked as well. And that confirmed to me that my gut instinct that it was okay was not just my own response to what I had created but was shared by my class as well.
I often wonder if part of my reason for continuing to paint and continuing to create to this day is wrapped up in the moment that I experienced back then, nearly wanting to be back in that classroom again to experience for the first time what it meant to do something that was appreciated. I was terrible at sport. In fact, I’ve never been any good at any sort of ball sports. I was hopeless at playing football in primary school, and here I’d found something that I could do. Here I’d found something that drew admiration. And in my young mind that was validation, and that was important to me. I was somebody who struggled with confidence in those days and who, in a way, had found it in this little farmhouse. I can see that as being the start of it all – and I can remember it as clearly as if it was last year.
So if that was some kind of revelatory moment for you, presumably it was something you were then able to do again and again when you sat down to draw?
Yes. I had grown up in a very creative home. My father taught art and my mother was very creative too. We always had a ‘useful box’ at home. Do you remember Play School [the BBC children’s programme] used to have a ‘useful box’? There were kitchen-roll tubes and different offcuts of fabric that we could make things with. I also grew up without a television at home. So, whilst I didn’t have anything to talk about with classmates on a Monday morning in terms of what I’d seen on TV that weekend, I had spent my time making stuff and drawing. All of those experiences preceded that farmhouse drawing. Art was important. I was taught that it was valid to spend time making something for the sheer enjoyment of it. And I was a curious child. I explored constantly what the possibilities of
drawing with crayons were, what sort of different strokes and marks and blobs I could get. I loved endlessly exploring that. It was play for me. I got that validation for my creativity from home, but suddenly I was getting the validation from my peers as well.
Your parents were encouragers – and you must have been aware of the fact that your father was an artist. Did you think of him in those terms?
Yes, I did, but I saw it as something that was ordinary. There was nothing extraordinary about painting. There was nothing extraordinary about wanting to spend an afternoon or an evening drawing for the sake of it. And I think that’s what solidified in my young mind that this was a potential direction to go in as a career. One of the other aspects to this was the fact that Finaghy Primary in those days had a full-time art teacher and that was very pioneering and very rare – a wonderful teacher called Jay Mateer. Every week the senior classes in the primary school got half a day with Mr Mateer in the art room. Not only was that important to me, to spend more time doing what I loved and what I thought was worthwhile, but it also cemented in my mind what was subconsciously coming through at home, which was very much that this could be as important an academic decision for me as learning maths and English, or physics and chemistry.
So even at that early stage in your life you were thinking of art in terms of a future career?
Totally. People would ask me about what I wanted to do when I grew up and I always knew I wanted to do something creative. At that stage the possibilities were to go into architecture or to be a designer or an interior designer. It was always going to be difficult and challenging, and indeed I subsequently learned that it was completely true that forging a career in painting is incredibly hard. It’s a roller coaster of ups and downs. That’s what the life of a painter is. But I knew that I wanted to spend my days creating in some way – I just didn’t know exactly what that would be.
previous spread
Colin and Mark in the studio.
Colin on his first day at Methodist College, 1980.
Colin on his last day at Belfast School of Art, 1991.
Photo by Shane Bunting
What about fitting in with your peers at that time? How challenging was that?
Art was the only thing I could do that was remotely cool. You’ve got to remember that I had a very pronounced stammer in those days and it still rears its head now. I was incredibly shy. I didn’t want to speak. I certainly didn’t want to speak in class. I was probably quite an invisible kid and suddenly the cool kids thought I was cool. That did my very low self-esteem the world of good.
So it was a positive factor in your childhood?
I was aware that suddenly somebody who was invisible was being seen. I also think, subconsciously, I realised that my art was not only something which I loved, it was not just something where I felt I could make some sort of a contribution, it was something through which I could top up what was really quite a low sense of myself as a human being.
Do you remember what sparked your interest as a child? What did you want to paint – and why?
I remember designing and building model stage sets for fun. Instead of taking a book to bed at night and reading until I fell asleep, I would bring a drawing pad to bed and I would draw until I fell asleep. I explored another world. Where other people would have read books and escaped to another world, I was drawing it. I remember when I was older doing my drama GCSE at Methody [Methodist College Belfast] and, of course, you had to analyse the odd play – but I did nothing but design and build stage sets.
My father also brought Letraset catalogues home from the school where he taught, and I remember spending hours on end meticulously copying typefaces. I remember designing posters. I remember designing a logo for a company which actually went live
when I was in my late teens. All of that was just an incredible passion for anything that was aesthetically creative – the visual arts in the broadest sense.
I remember my father bringing a video camera home from school as well – this must have been in the 1980s – and spending the summer recording and making films. So my practice even back then was as varied as it was possible to be.
And do you remember what you were painting and drawing at the time?
I remember my father taking me to the Ulster Motor Show and the two of us looking at the cars and then picking up the brochures. I came straight home and spent weeks designing cars, recognising all of the bits that I saw as being beautiful. I remember specifically the back light of a Chrysler and building that in with the wheel design of another car that I loved in the shape of a Porsche, and designing my own car. So it was much broader than streetscapes and landscapes and bowls of fruit.
And then the decision had to be taken at some point in your late teens as to what you were going to do after Methody. Interestingly, you chose to go down the design route when you went to the Art College in Belfast, rather than painting.
Yes. Neil Shawcross [the artist] was my tutor in the foundation year and in some ways that was the best year because I could experiment. I worked in print, design, three dimensions, photography – which I particularly loved – and painting. You could explore it all up to a certain extent before you had to decide what to focus on. I remember Neil saying to me, ‘Look, you can do any of these things. Just decide what you want to do.’ At that stage the design course was quite broad. It wasn’t just purely a graphic design course or a product design course, it encompassed all aspects of design built into a three-year degree. I decided to go for that – and it led me in the design direction.
It’s funny, though, because in my last year, with a tutor called Terry Aston, I decided I wanted to paint. My father had got out of teaching a few years before that and he was building a career as a painter, and I thought, I’d love to explore that for myself. So I was able to build my painting into the design through the illustration route. In fact, my final degree show in 1991 was a whole mishmash of painting, design, three-dimensional design and product design. I also did a bit of stained glass. It was as varied as it was possible to be and, I’m actually only realising this now, but this whole idea that I’m not pigeon-holed into anything is something that I’m keen to keep to this day. I’m genuinely only realising that now.
And, of course, for many years you had a serious career working within the design industry in Northern Ireland. How do you look back on that period of your life now?
I look back on that period as vitally important in determining what I’m doing now. I bring aspects of the way that I worked as a designer on the computer or at the drawing board – or behind a camera – to my work now. I believe there is a graphic sensibility to what I do now.
When I left art college I started to paint, and I formed a professional relationship with the gallerist Tom Caldwell in Belfast, who represented Basil Blackshaw, Colin Middleton and Neil Shawcross. He liked my work and I started to show with him, but at the same time that itchiness kept on at me and I felt I wanted to explore being a designer working in the commercial world. I got a job in a company called GCAS, which was an advertising company in Belfast, and I worked there for two years. I met Pauline, my wife, there. She was a designer too. Then I formed a design practice of my own and I built up a small team of people over a couple of years. I still continued painting, though I was doing it in my free time.
And during that time I was showing with Tom Caldwell, though my paintings were almost violent reactions against the stresses of the day. So I’d come home at night and the paintings would be quick, colourful bursts of energy, very much inspired by my heroes at that
right Summer Garden Painting
oil on canvas
76 x 71 cm private collection
time – artists like Frank Auerbach and Willem de Kooning. I’m really inspired by the American abstract expressionists. I needed to have the stresses of the day of being an employer, of working to a deadline, of pleasing clients, to bounce off in my little studio at home at night.
That’s where those paintings from that time came from. But, as time went on and my company got more and more successful, I realised that wasn’t what I wanted to do. The restless, impatient Colin came to the fore and I think what I realised then was that if I was destined to do anything truly original in my career – if I was going to do anything that could be seen as being quintessentially just me – I was missing the opportunity within the design field. I was making nice work, but it was ultimately to please a client. It wasn’t to please me or to explore a deeper, more important sense of meaning. I became restless again and I realised I wanted to paint full-time – and I got out of my design company.
People assume when you’re self-employed that you’re living your dream. I was self-employed and trapped in a cycle of being an employer with all the struggles of being an employer. I realised it just wasn’t me. I was missing the creative opportunities, and I decided to take that huge step when Emma, our daughter, was two or three years old and Sophie was on the way. I’ll tell you this, I needed to explain long and hard what I was doing to Pauline’s dad, my father-in-law, who saw someone successfully running a business that he was about to give up to pursue a dream!
So how did that conversation go?
It was basically, ‘Colin, you spent four years building this company, which is very successful. You’re known for what you do. You’ve got a really impressive client list. What on earth are you playing at?’ But I had a raw determination, a self-belief – from early childhood – that my self-worth was wrapped up in my art. It could have been very self-destructive, but that move ended up being the very thing that propelled me on to the next phase of my career.
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Colin in the studio with Derelict Belfast Street in the background, 2003.
Photo by John Harrison
And now there are clearly people who think of you primarily as Colin Davidson the portrait painter – and, of course, you always say that’s not how you want to be defined because it’s only part of what you do. It doesn’t define you as an artist.
It’s not even that it’s not what I want to be defined as – it’s actually an inaccurate definition. Portraiture is a part – in fact, it’s quite a small part – of what I do. But it’s the most public aspect of what I do. And because a lot of the people I paint are well known, it ends up being the work of mine which is most readily seen and remembered. To this day, as you’re walking through my studio, you’ll see the threedimensional heads and the three-dimensional painted human forms, you’ll see I’ve got faces up on the wall as masks – which have been painted – as well as window-reflection paintings and portraits. I’m still that kid. I’m still that child. And that, in some ways, is what I am keeping alive to this day.
So what keeps you going and what keeps you fresh is the fact that you never settle on any one particular thing?
Yes, totally. I’m incredibly easily bored. I have a restless imagination and until I see something through that is in my imagination or in the conceptual part of my brain, I am quite restless. And, in fact, that’s what I have done for a lot of my career: I discover something and, as I focus on it, I move on from what I did in the past.
Big Red Lighthouse
on canvas
x 123 cm
