The Darent Pages And The Darent Suite Exhibition. 21 Oct - 6 Dec 2013

The Darent paintings by John Davie, explore visionary artist Samuel Palmer’s relationship with William Blake, John Linnell, their friends, ‘The Ancients’, and the River Darent at Shoreham in Kent.

John Davie is a painter interested in the challenge presented by ideas and their mediation as images: of how in a painting, specific, articulated ideas come to be associated with particular images or ways of making an image. Davie accepts that meaning should be struggled for and not just delivered.

In Davie's work, the result of this process may seem transparent, as in The Darent Suite. This series of paintings about the flow and progress of the River Darent, are simultaneously meditations about painting itself, and also how, if a river is 'there', it might be painted. In another way, the mediation may be embedded in and filtered out of literary and biographical sources as in The Darent Pages. In this series of mixed media works, Davie explores the interface between ideology and practice to create the kind of narratives that compose this extensive series about Samuel Palmer and his time in Shoreham.

Davie is currently gaining widespread endorsement for the ambition and intelligence of the work completed since his return to painting full-time in 2008.