‘It’s got to be fun, Geoff’. My voice memo runs out. Paul Davis is completely serious. We had a discussion for two hours across the road from his studio in Shoreditch. He has talked about many things, and I have jumped at the chance to write about his work. But the recording has ended and I still don’t feel it’s a very easy subject. He has talked eloquently about opposites, contrasts, contradictions, about how he is both an illustrator and an artist and still finds time to devote to being a picture editor of ‘The Drawbridge ’. He now appears closer to resolving the familiar dichotomy of the commercial artist, the commissioned versus the self-initiated, just like one of his many heroes Saul Steinberg.
For years Paul Davis has worked as an illustrator and image maker for advertising creatives and their clients and at the sharper end of design, building a reputation for spontaneity and improvisation, in both image and letterform. It’s a difficult path to navigate, but he remains an enthusiastic observer and recorder of the human condition, his art is fuelled by thought, by enquiry perhaps by its own contradictions. When he was still quite young, his father died and Davis made a conscious decision to ‘play-safe’ and follow a more financially stable commercial art practice as opposed to painting. Something he says he now regrets, yet the irony is that rather than make ‘safe’ imagery he has found success in pushing at the boundaries of communication art, often openly critical of practices and attitudes that align with the predictable. His visual voice emerged via a Graphic Design course and then free-lance illustration eventually to encapsulate anti-slickness and a critique of commercial correctness. Growing up overlooking the flatlands of the Somerset levels in the West Country, he developed an antidote for boredom by exercising his imagination filling notebooks with ideas expressed in pictures and the same letterforms that would much later become a font.
