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Gareth Hugh Davies is best known for the powerful, enigmatic and haunting imagery in his paintings.
The absence of the figure in familiar visual references such as pine forests, grey skies, rain clouds, urban lighting and tracks in snow enables several interpretations.
“I’m interested in the quiet drama that simple visual references can create. They can be read as meditations on the tensions between light and dark, the remote and the familiar, comfort and a sense of isolation. These pieces are also as much about our transience as our ability to transform the land in which we inhabit”
Gareth Hugh Davies trained at Dyfed College of Art, Carmarthen, Portsmouth Polytechnic and North Staffordshire Polytechnic, specialising in Stained Glass design.
In 1990 he won the Gold Medal for Fine Art at The National Eisteddfod of Wales. He has exhibited at The National Portrait Gallery, with the RBA at the Mall galleries and on several occasions at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions.
His work is held in numerous private collections and the public collections of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, University of South Wales, Oriel y Bont, and Carmarthenshire County Collection. He lives and works in Carmarthenshire.
A solo exhibition by Gareth is now on at Plas Glyn-y-Weddw until December 24th. Read about the exhibition below.
'The Land Remembered'
October 15 - December 24, 2023
The series of paintings and drawings is the result of work carried out on location and in the studio. Everything begins with drawing, and remembering. They begin as an immediate response to a particular landscape but may transform with continual reworking and re-examining to the extent that topographical concerns become secondary, and a more personal visceral response is allowed to develop.
Texture and surface are important to me, the physical aspect of paint, how it handles and continues to surprise with its ability to conjure the vast from the smallest of marks and gestures.
It can express the unsayable.
Magritte said of his Empire of Light series of paintings that ‘The landscape suggests night and the skyscape day. This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power: poetry’
I think this notion of ‘poetry’ has underpinned my recent approach to painting, the notion that the intangible can be suggested through the juxtaposition of form, colour and line. An idea of landscape, reimagined and remembered to convey feeling and a sense of a psychological space.