The book of flow and some other drawings

‘He paints a picture of furious productivity.

He works every day. Drawings pour out of him; he draws as often as other people draw breath.’ Adrian Shaughnessy ‘Genius – best yet.’ Malcolm Garrett ‘Davis’s latest book distils his gifts as an artist, linguist, anatomist and humanist.

His thinking is gin-clear, his language pitch-perfect, and his drawings spare and heart achingly true.’ Leanne Shapton

lesson at primary school did it for A to B and beyond Amemaths in about 1972, or it could have been my father showing me a simple venn diagram Paul Davis in one of those glorious Time Life books on energy or mathematics or matter.

I was immediately hooked – it was a new discovery, a new language and such gleeful fun. Colour venn: two overlapping circles, red in the left, blue in the right and, magnificently, purple in the middle (I was 10). This is how it all started. Flow diagrams were next. From the year dot described in a tree-like form, the eras, dinosaurs, flora and fauna, mammals, species flying off at angles. They have the potential to tell stories.

Some novelists still employ a timeline which generally describes a beginning, middle and end, but that line can also be bombarded by characters’ names, deeds, locations, essential description, plot, time shifts etc. A great ploy in which to backtrack and not lose your way; a sort of continuity device.

I enjoy using flow diagrams as an attempt to work out some semblance of what’s what, why and how things are what they are. They can be very careful and rational (the incredible life of something), banal (a bus journey for example), surreal (something inexplicable happens yet somehow has to be described) or preposterous (chance meetings and other coincidences). I tend to think probably rather too much of our 4-billion-year-old earth forming itself within the lifetime of our 13-billion-year-old universe that started from either the Big Bang or created by that make-believe nonentity called God. And within that timeframe it’s important to be aware of our incredibly self-important ignorance and idiocy. Look at The Jeremy Kyle Show, Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor. We are mad, all of us, except possibly David Attenborough.

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As I get older, I feel more relaxed about the existential questions that have marked mankind for thousands of years. Folk yearn to work out what on earth is going on by using books, poetry, paintings, philosophy, music, quantum mechanics, black holes, scientific research or sacred texts, fanaticism, the deity. Mind-altering substances fit in there somewhere too; maybe a flow/venn diagram amalgamation may help to make it easier to understand.

Walks are great way to see what occurs (when you can bear to drag yourself away from Cash in the Attic) and then make notes, draw or take photographs. The choice of turning left or right at a junction is wonderfully arbitrary but if I go one way I always wonder if I should have gone the other in case I missed something entertaining, mysterious or hilarious.

The East End of London is good for all three. Then when I’m back in the studio, after looking at my faintly ridiculous scribblings, I’ll either scan in what I’ve got or transfer the notes to a new artwork adding downright lies, fabrications and other fantasies if I feel like it while carefully editing out things that mean nothing or degrade the spirit of the walk.

In a way we all are flow diagrams: we’re born, we live, and then we don’t.

Forever. Might just as well have some fun with that grim reality.

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Flowing Adrian Shaughnessy

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London: an early morning train. I’m trying to read my book but the guard has an unstoppable impulse to make banal announcements every few minutes, urging us to be careful on the icy platforms. He’d be a good target for one of Paul Davis’s drawings. It’s easy to imagine Davis satirising his unctuous pronouncements and his feigned concern for our safety and comfort. I’m on my way to see Davis. He’s asked me to write something for this book.

I said I didn’t want to harp on about where he went to art school or what his first job was. He said we should go for a walk around Shoreditch. Yes, I said, we could be flâneurs for a day. I could be Boswell to his Johnson.

We’d probably bump into Iain Sinclair along the way.

We agree to meet in a café near Curtain Road. As I look for it, I’m passed by Hoxton tribe members going to work. Most of them are dressed as if on their way to nightclubs.

I find the café. We’re the only customers.

A hesitant man takes our coffee order.

Davis asks for a croissant with jam. It arrives with no jam. When the jam arrives, he has to ask for a knife. I order a ham-andcheese croissant, which takes 15 minutes to appear and also comes with no cutlery.

Then our man disappears, apparently exhausted by the effort.

We talk. Familiar stuff. Design industry tittle-tattle. Davis moans goodhumouredly about gutless commissioners who say they like his work but get other people to rip off his style. He’s not bitter – just uncomprehending. He paints a picture of furious productivity. He works every day. Drawings pour out of him; he draws as often as other people draw breath. Later at his studio he shows me the outcome of all this effort. He tells me about a recent attack of swine flu. Just like two weeks with a bad hangover, he says. He looks thinner. Muses about getting closer to 50. Alternates between melancholia and conviviality.

Davis was due to give a talk in Denmark with David Shrigley but had to flunk out because of his flu. The Shrigley-Davis question follows him around. In the eyes of many they are the squiggly-line twins, impossible to tell apart, and the pair have often joked about doing a one-man show together. But as anyone who takes the trouble to look will see, their work is quite different. For all his freeform visual riffing, Davis is at heart a graphic designer. It shows in his use of lettering and in his sense of composition. What looks ramshackle and chaotic (he’s even done some drawings with his eyes shut) is invariably balanced and structured.

Everything Davis does is designed.

Shrigley on the other hand just lets rip.

This difference between the two perhaps explains why Shrigley has been adopted by the art crowd while Davis has acquired a following amongst designers. Again, Davis expresses incomprehension. Sometimes I don’t understand the world, he says.

We leave the café. London grey has been replaced by the brittle yellowy brightness of a winter sun. We set off.

Davis talks about money, his girlfriend.

His recent attack by an unknown assailant.

People sit in cafés staring out. I wonder what jobs they have that allow them to be sipping coffee at 10.30am. Perhaps they’re wondering what the two of us are doing trolling around like a couple of truanting schoolkids.

I ask him about the beating. I knew he’d been attacked but I didn’t know the details. When mutual friends had spoken about it, they had winced sympathetically in a way that discouraged questions. What happened? I asked. Davis had left his flat in Dalston early one evening. As he walked down the street he was smashed on the head by someone who came up behind him. He only remembers waking up in an ambulance. The attacker had severed an artery in his head. His face was a mask of blood.

He has no idea why he was attacked. The same thing has happened to other people he knows. It might be a gang initiation rite: young bloods earning their stripes by performing acts of random violence. Davis seems an unlikely victim. He’s wiry and agile, not an obvious target. But evidently someone thought it was a good idea to bash him on the head. A few days after the event, despite bruising and discomfort, he gave a lecture in New York. He wore Jackie O sunglasses and impressed the NY audience with his British stoicism. For Davis the attack is yet more cause for bafflement and incomprehension.

We pound the pavements around Brick Lane. We pass galleries and shops.

Everywhere we look we see signs of the boho gentrification that will eventually turn Shoreditch into Covent Garden.

Davis tells me that Walthamstow is the next London district to be sanctified by the style arbiters who decide these things.

Suddenly diverted, he points to the myriad of tiny ovals of flattened chewing gum that cover the roads and pavements, momentarily illuminated and glowing in the slanting December sun like a shoal of tiny flatfish veering into view. He says that these blobs – and the blobs that appear on his retinas – inspired the ovals that populate his newer work.

In the Rough Trade shop off Brick Lane, Davis buys a handful of CDs by The Fall.

He enthuses about Mark E. Smith (the artist Davis once declared he would most like to collaborate with; Salford’s curmudgeonly son has so far failed to take him up on it).

After Brick Lane we push eastward. We stand in the forlorn bandstand at Arnold Circus. Roads radiate out like a pallid East End version of Paris. Davis smokes a cigarette. Nothing much is happening. The elegant redbrick housing estates are quiet.

No one is on the street. No traffic.

We wander over to the Rochelle School, an old-fashioned Victorian building displaying separate entrances for boys and girls. It’s no longer a school, but if you listen carefully you can hear the ghostly yelping of hundreds of children from the nearby Boundary estate – one of the first housing estates and a legendary place in East End social history. The Rochelle is now a fashionable space inhabited by a gallery, an artists’ agent, a design studio, a publisher and – where the old bike shed once stood – a stylish eatery. It’s where the curiously Saatchi-free School of Saatchi TV show was shot. Davis meets someone he has had professional dealings with. They tap-dance around each other – he charming and eager, she wary and distant. I go off to inspect some Victorian brickwork.

We head back to Davis’s studio. On the way we stop off in a shop selling skateboards, brogues and £300 jackets.

We call in at ArtWords, the tiny art and design bookshop off Curtain Road. Like many before us, we leave without buying anything.

Back at Davis’s studio we look through his work. He gives me a disk containing the drawings in this book. Sheaves of other sketches are laid out on every available surface. He shows me the pages of a project he’s working on that mixes highly abstract but decorative drawings with oddly colourless photographs of moments in his life. I see the vibrant ovals in the drawings and remember the chewing gum. He talks me through the photographs. Each one resonates with personal significance.

We go to lunch at a nearby restaurant.

Davis is a regular. He’s greeted warmly, but the place is full, so we sit at the bar and wait for Davis’s frequent collaborator Stephen Coates. When he arrives, we move to a newly vacant table. Coates and Davis pile into the Guardian crossword. In turns, two clues at a time. I’m given a chance to fill in some gaps, but I sense that I’m intruding on a well-practised ritual.

More chat about design-world scandals.

Davis goes into a long rant about the Saatchi TV show, mimicking the up-talking students. It’s not hard to imagine some of their more asinine utterances ending up in his work. The crossword is nearly finished.

Cheery arguments break out about who has missed a turn.

After lunch, Davis and Coates head back into Shoreditch while I head for Epsom where I have an appointment at the art school. Epsom is a long way from Shoreditch. It’s the home of another British tribe – civil servants and insurance brokers who travel up to London on crowded commuter trains reading The Times and Daily Mail and dreaming of retirement and long days of golf in damp English autumns.

But Epsom has a link with drawing too. It was briefly the home of Aubrey Beardsley, the first superstar of English illustration and the patron saint of English weird.

A consumptive who coughed blood into his handkerchief and was dead at 26.

Blood again. A recurring theme of the day. I can’t shake off thoughts of Davis’s attack. I hear footsteps behind me. I look round and see a gangly youth in skinny jeans and big hair, something in his hand glinting in the sun. I look again and it’s only a cup of coffee with a plastic lid. I think of blood. I think about it flowing and flowing.

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List of works

page 2 Life Is Really Idiotic Paint, ink, graphite on paper 296 x 207 mm

page 22 Ignore Inevitable Discouragement Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 37 Shelves Ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 53 His Holiness Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 68 Corporeal v Intellect Ink, graphite on paper 296 x 229 mm

page 83 And So On Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 297 mm

page 7 Weekdays a.m.

Paint, ink, graphite on paper 320 x 225 mm

page 23 Heaven and Hell Ink, graphite on paper 278 x 206 mm

page 38 Our Lives Ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 54 Potential Ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 69 Your Stuff Paint, ink, graphite on paper 594 x 420 mm

page 84 Bleak Disappointment Ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 8 Analogy Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 216 mm

page 24 Meaninglessness Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 39 Factogram Paint, ink, graphite on paper 417 x 297 mm

page 70 Help Me Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 85 Indiscreet Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210

page 9 Pie Chart Ink, graphite on paper 950 x 700 mm

page 25 Day Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 40 Think Ink, graphite on paper 300 x 230 mm

page 71 Who Are You? Ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 87 Violent Schizophrenics Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 10 Simple Behavioral Advice Paint, ink, graphite on paper 594 x 420 mm

page 26 Inevitable Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 41 Control Paint, ink, graphite on paper 594 x 420 mm

page 72 You Now (diptych, left) Paint, ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 320 x 225 mm

page 88 Walk of Shame Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 11 Miraculous Day Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 27 More Suo Ink, graphite on paper 300 x 230 mm

page 42 Water Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 12 Smug and Pious Ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 29 Middle Age Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 43 Never Ending Paint, ink, graphite on paper 594 x 420 mm

page 13 Gasp Paint, ink, graphite on paper 594 x 420 mm

page 30 Real Ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 44 Efficacious Ink, graphite on paper 399 x 282 mm

page 14 05.45 Ink, graphite on paper 297 x 215 mm page 15 God 1, God 2, God 3 Ink, graphite on paper 389 x 281 mm page 17 Dangers of Vulgarity Ink, graphite, Photoshop on paper 298 x 213 mm page 18 Awaken Paint, ink, graphite on paper 594 x 420 mm page 19 Me Ink, graphite on paper 389 x 281 mm page 20 Hilarity, Despair Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm page 21 Haunted Ruinousness Paint, ink, graphite on paper 594 x 420 mm

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page 31 2 Hour Meeting Ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm page 32 Burst Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 45 Uugh Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm page 47 Thoughtfulness Ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 33 Stupid Gods Paint, ink, graphite on paper 950 x 700 mm

page 48 Shit Ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 34 Almighty Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 49 Nature Graphite, Photoshop on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 35 The Dream Paint, ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 416 x 294 mm

page 50 Start Ink, graphite on paper 271 x 215 mm

page 36 Media Ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 51 Sublime Paint, ink, graphite on paper 594 x 420 mm page 52 General Response Paint, ink, graphite on paper 594 x 420 mm

page 55 Remember Ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 214 x 134 mm page 56 Insnty Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm page 57 Fervently Lead Paint, ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 297 x 210 mm page 58 Unrelenting Paint, ink, graphite on paper 594 x 420 mm page 59 You Must Paint, ink, graphite, Photoshop on paper 296 x 226 mm page 60 The Diplomats Paint, ink, graphite on paper 418 x 296 mm page 61 Walk to Work Paint, ink, graphite on paper 292 x 229 mm page 63 Pre-History Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm page 64 You, It Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm page 65 Ends Ink, graphite on paper 278 x 215 mm page 66 2007, 2008 Paint, ink, graphite on paper 280 x 215 mm page 67 Ancient History Ink, graphite on paper 296 x 225 mm

page 73 Be (diptych, right) Paint, ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 320 x 225 mm page 75 Dog Day Paint, ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 297 x 210 mm page 76 Love Ink, graphite, marker on paper 262 x 200 mm page 77 Egg & Sperm Paint, ink, graphite on paper 594 x 420 mm page 78 Maniac Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm page 79 Immortality Ink, graphite, marker on paper 260 x 200 mm page 80 Impulse Poem Ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm page 81 Dream of Product Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 89 Oversight Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm page 90 Historic Importance Paint, ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 297 x 210 mm page 91 Beginnings Paint, ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm page 92 The Future Paint, ink, graphite on paper 294 x 210 mm page 93 Bobby Jones Ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm page 94 Staying In Paint, ink, graphite on paper 320 x 255 mm page 95 The Good Day Ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 297 x 210 mm page 97 Magnificence Ink, graphite on paper 297 x 210 mm

page 82 Collapse Paint, ink, graphite, coloured pencil on paper 297 x 210 mm

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First published in 2010

by Davis Systems Back Building 150 Curtain Road London EC2A 3AR Tel: +44 (0)20 7739 7765 email: davis@copyrightdavis.com www.copyrightdavis.com Text © 2010 Paul Davis and Adrian Shaughnessy Drawings © 2010 Paul Davis A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use permission of the copyright owner must be obtained.

Designer: Stephen Coates Design assistant: Henrietta Molinaro Managing editor: Mark Reynolds Printed by Westerham Press Acknowledgements A major thank you to Stephen Coates, Adrian Shaughnessy and Henrietta Molinaro.

Impossible without you.

And a large thanks to Mark Reynolds for copyediting and Lloyd Bromhead and Westerham Press for printing the book so beautifully.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Frank Davis and Thomas Gibbs who, I think, both understood the idiocy of life.