RUA Annual Exhibition 2016

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine 6 November 2016

The Royal Ulster Academy's annual exhibition is usually a good opportunity to enjoy a panoramic view what's happening in the art scene north of the border and to spot some emerging talent. This year however the exhibition has a broader scope with a large number of selected artists and invited artists coming from south of the border. Conversely a number of the North's more established figures, and RUA members, are missing. Without running a fine comb through the exhibitors I notice that there's no Colin Davidson or Paul Seawright. Given the dearth of open submission shows in this country it's good to see the RUA casting its net so wide, with artists such as Karen Hendy from West Cork and Gavin Lavelle from Galway joining the many Dublin-based contributors.

There's a sombre side to the show. The  attractive and informative catalogue contains obituaries of seven members of the Academy who have died in the past 12 months. In addition to these texts, each of the deceased is remembered via two works in the exhibition. The best-known amongst them is Basil Blackshaw. He is represented by a fine portrait of his old friend the late T.P. Flanagan and by the very aptly chosen Big Brown Dog. Blackshaw was an animal lover and dog owner all his life and far preferred talking about his dogs than his art. In an interview a few years ago he was more animated about a champion greyhound he once owned than about any of his major paintings.The Irish art world is diminished by his passing.

 A feature of the exhibition is the large number of portraits, portrait busts, and generally figurative work on view. Poets and artists inspire a number of these. There's a bronze bust of a young Seamus Heaney and a ruddy and romanticised painting of Michael Longley holding a wren in one hand, some flowers in the other, and looking a tad embarrassed about it all. There's a very fine ceramic bust of Austin Clarke by Bob Sloan and nearby you can find his namesake the 1916 leader Thomas Clarke. Robert Ballagh has an austere painting of Brian O'Doherty (the erstwhile Patrick Ireland), a fellow artist who shares his interest in Irish politics. Hector McDonnell shows Neil Shawcross on a suitably red armchair amidst the contents of his studio. There's plenty of quirky and characterful portraits as well. Michael Connolly's Intern is a memorable study in gormlessness, Paul Bell's Wolf has a stolid menace, and Emily Scott's Filippa exudes character and elegance. There are so many good portraits it seems invidious not to name more. There's David McDowell's skilful pencil drawing Remember Me and Jackie Edward's burnished old man in The Heart That Asks. A few of the artists introduce a little light eroticism into the mix, these include Carol Graham's Iconic Allure of Light, and Kyle Barnes' Fixation.

 Of the many works relating to the human face or figure Francis O'Toole's One for Sorrow (above) stands out. This splendid, glowing, sinuous and troublingly ambiguous nude verily steals the show. O'Toole's meticulous painting devotes as much care and loving attention to the knots on the wooden floor as to the dimples on the subject's back.   Sculpture is very well served both in terms of quality and quantity. This seems to have been the result of a deliberate policy as most of the invited artists are well-known sculptors. As you walk into the gallery the first piece you encounter is Furrow by Eilis O'Connell, a small bronze that demonstrates those characteristic O'Connell qualities of perfect harmony and subtle suggestiveness. Further into the first gallery there's the powerful Woodquay Bull by John Behan and the playful The Visitor - a rampant bronze grasshopper by Deborah Brown that won the Mullan Gallery Award for best sculpture.The flag of abstraction is flown by Michael Warren with  Kireji, a blackened bronze slab with fissures, Stephen Deery's Deliverence, and Corban Walker with an intricate maze-like creation. Ann Butler's surreal white porcelain sewing machine and Peter Meanley's playful stoneware The Fisherman also catch the eye.

 There's plenty of paintings of the highest quality - these include The Garden Shed, an accomplished and painterly work by Clement McAleer, Breaking Wave, a fine brooding seascape by James Allen, Long Duree by Jennifer Trouton which won the Tyrone Guthrie Residency Award, Cormac O'Leary's Inisheer II, and Mick O'Dea's dramatic tour-de-force Study for the Burning of the RHA. There are two large lively works by Diarmuid Delargy and an uncharacteristically abstract piece by Neil Shawcross - the title Jazz is the clue to this freeform exercise. Our quiet woodlands are given their due by Keith Wilson with Being Here and Michael Wann's Woodland Shadow - the latter in charcoal, a medium not for the faint-hearted.

 Photography is not very well represented with less than a dozen works on show. Rory Moore's Brig Mary Jane, Westport-Baltimore 1847 is an evocation of the Great Famine. It shows a ruined and abandoned cottage against a brooding western sky. Aidan Crawley adds a further sombre note with Missing I - a study of the Somme landscape. In viewing a show with 329 exhibits it's hard to do justice to the eight video offerings which require more time to absorb than viewers usually have. Many of them can be sourced online for more leisurely perusal. Oona Doherty's Hard to be Soft featured the artist showing admirable litheness as she performed her expressive dance.

 Print does somewhat better than photography in terms of numbers. March is an accomplished lithograph by Elizabeth Magill, Margaret Mannion Kallen won the Nicholson Bass Printmaking Prize for Not a Walk in the Park, an etching and carborundum print, and Crona Gallagher produced a couple of charming copperplate etchings .

 There's plenty of fun to be had in this is an entertaining and eclectic show. You don't have to be a dog lover to enjoy Caroline Fellowes Obedience IV (a dog on a chair in a flood) which manages to be both surreal and poignant at the same time. And you'll surely smile at Stephen Johnston's photo-realist Cake in a Jar which earned him the KPMG Young Artist Award. The selection committee have done a good job in purging the show of the worthy landscapes and other stodgy fare that often dominate academy exhibitions.

 Ulster Museum
 Belfast


 John P. O'Sullivan
 November 2016

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Glimpses of John Montague

 

John Montague is well into his eighties now and his public appearances in Ireland have become a rarity. He spends most of his time in the kindlier climes of Nice and only returns to his West Cork house during the summer months. He's inclined to sleep in the comfort of a B&B in Schull and use his house near Ballydehob to work and to organise his archive. Anytime I have seen Montague in the last 20 years his current partner has been pretty much welded to his side. She's a diminutive and rather intimidating American woman called Elizabeth Wassell. She's quite extraordinary looking: a tiny figure with great watchful eyes, a lubricious mouth, and a tight skull cap of dyed red hair. She's something of a novelist in a minor key but her role in life is clearly to minister to the great poet and control access to his presence.

I have bumped into Montague from time to time over the past 40 years. He was a lecturer n the English department in UCC while I was a student there. I remember him bringing a sexual dimension to Wordsworth's poetry that caused some fluttering in the dovecotes - especially in the serried ranks of nuns. Montague found Wordsworth's Nutting a particularly juicy source of speculation.

Through beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets,

Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook

Unvisited

Montague mingled with the students socially and particularly with the College poets including Sean Dunne, Theo Dorgan and Greg O'Donoghue. I'd often see him in Henchey's pub in St. Luke's with Sean Lucey, the Professor of English - a charming man whose life sadly went off the rails later.

Montague's arrival coincided with my last year in UCC and I moved on with my gentleman's degree in English and Philosophy. I didn't encounter him again until about 20 years later when I was staying in D'Arcy's B&B in Wellington Road in Cork - a raffish venue much favoured by artists and writers. I was informed when I checked in that Montague was in the next room to mine - Claire D'Arcy assumed correctly I would know him. There was no sign of him that evening but after I returned from having a few pints with my old buddy Maurice Desmond in Henchey's it became clear that he was back in his room. The next morning we went down for breakfast and the bould Claire marched us straight over to Montague's table so we could breakfast together. Montague was as courtly as ever and introduced us to the new girl friend Elizabeth. We discovered at breakfast that we were both heading to Skibbereen for an art exhibition so I agreed to give them a lift. He was waiting for me on the steps outside at midday - sitting in the sunshine reading to his new girl from the collected poems of Thomas Hardy. Nice. We enjoyed a pleasant journey south punctuated with a pit stop in Rosscarbery for a pint. It had turned cold and I remember how solicitous Montague was towards Elizabeth - proffering her his jacket as she shivered fetchingly. I didn't see much of him in subsequent years apart from occasional encounters in the old Shelbourne Bar. He always stopped for a chat and was unfailingly affable. He never lost that mischievous twinkle in the eye.

Over a year ago I was interviewing the artist Colin Davidson for a profile I was writing for the Sunday Times. Colin had done portraits of most of the North's leading literary lights: Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Michael Longley amongst others. I observed that he had omitted Montague from his pantheon and he agreed but said the reason was he had difficulty getting hold of him. I said I'd see what I could do to enable a sitting to happen. Given Montague's age it was tacitly agreed that it should be sooner rather than later. I knew he lived in Nice for a lot of the year so we would have to get him on one of his summer visits to Ireland. I got his Nice number and email address from Theo Dorgan and sent off a speculative email. A number of phone calls and emails ensued. Apart from a very brief word with Montague all of the dialogue was conducted with Elizabeth. There was a window of opportunity in late August when they were in Schull through which Colin could climb. More of which anon but in the meantime I got a chance to see the great man in action one more time.

An old UCC sparring partner, Eamon O'Donoghue, arranged to bring the poet over from his French base to do a reading during the Claregalway Garden Festival. The bold Doctor O'Donoghue had bought and heroically refurbished an old Norman castle in the town and this was the venue for the reading. I met Montague beforehand. He was having a glass of white wine and some cheese in an anteroom to the castle. Elizabeth sat by his side gazing up at him adoringly the while. Around him were clustered an artistic elite: Brian Bourke, Mary O'Malley and Jay Murphy amongst others. He looked frail but still retained that roguish twinkle. He's never been the greatest of readers, his mild stutter often intruding, so I was a bit apprehensive about how he might perform. It seemed good that he was taking the precaution of having a few glasses of wine beforehand for fortification purposes. I needn't have worried. Inspired perhaps by a very large audience, or the wine he continued to drink, he gave a fine robust reading - even cracking the odd joke. He began with that very slippery and sexual poem The Trout, which he dedicated to the memory of his old buddy Barrie Cooke. He also did that beautiful tremulous love poem All Legendary Obstacles:

All legendary obstacles lay between

Us, the long imaginary plain

The monstrous ruck of mountains

He continued through many of his best known poems, including Like Dolmens Round my Childhood and concluded with Landing, a tribute to his current wife:

"beside whom I now belong . . . my late but final anchoring”

There seems something wrong with that metaphor - a hint of captivity perhaps - but who am I question the great poet.

After the performance they inflicted the usual book signing debacle on the poor guy. The last I saw of him was with his tiny wife and the estimable Mary O'Malley who were supporting him on either side as they led him to the car that would take back to the hotel. The sailor is definitely home from the sea.

A couple of months later the portrait sitting happened in the Grove Guest House in Schull. Colin Davidson was granted an hour during which he took photographs and did a number of his preparatory sketches. The sitting went well according to Colin. Apparently the two Northern boys found common cause in their stutters - Colin also has a mild and not unattractive stammer. I look forward to seeing the end result. A museum or academic institution in the North or in Cork would seem apt. Or perhaps a benefactor could buy it for the Writer's Museum.

I had hoped to get an interview with Montague while he was in Schull but I was made aware by Elizabeth that I had used up my time allotment. In fact Lara Marlowe had done an excellent piece on him in the Irish Times not too long ago and I'm not sure I could have improved on it. She asked him the one question I would certainly have asked. It was the same question Montague asked Samuel Beckett in an interview just before he died: "Tell me Sam, looking back, has it all been worth while?". To which Beckett replied in the predictable negative, adding "and what's more I watched my mother die". When asked the same question by Marlowe, Montague was less bitter but did intimate that things could have been easier for him materially. A bit of a surprise that coming from a man with a winter retreat in Nice. But perhaps he feels underappreciated - that some of the rewards and plaudits that decorated his old buddy Seamus Heaney could have come his way.

 

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RUA Annual Exhibition

Nineteen Eighty-four by Neil Shawcross

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture Magazine on 26 October 2014.

 

Visitors to the Royal Ulster Academy (RUA) annual show from outside Belfast should consider the train. Arriving at Central Station you can stretch your legs by taking a 30-minute walk along a scenic stretch of the Lagan, admiring the doughty oarsmen and women as your proceed. Turn right into the Botanic Gardens and there you'll find the large, spanking new and well-appointed Ulster Museum. The RUA annual show was a moveable feast in terms of location for a number of years but since the Ulster Museum reopened in 2009 it has settled there. There are plans afoot for the RUA to secure a permanent home of its own in a five-story listed building on Ann Street but these will take some years to come to fruition.

Just as the Royal Hibernian Academy's (RHA) annual show gives us a panoramic view of the current state of Irish art, the RUA show provides an overview of what's happening in the North. There are differences in the selection process however. The RUA follow the Royal Academy (RA) model where there's a two stage selection process, rather than the more unwieldy RHA model where there's no preliminary stage. Stage one involves online shortlisting whereby images uploaded by entrants are viewed. About a third of these are shortlisted and then delivered to the Academy for actual viewing. A second selection then takes place and the academy displays around a third of these shortlisted works. There's another major difference with the RHA. The academicians of the RUA confine themselves to two pieces each. (Those over 75 are allowed a third, on the grounds, I suppose, of respect for the venerable.) Their Southern peers at the RHA can take advantage of an entitlement of up to seven pieces. For example at the last RHA show Thomas Ryan and John Behan displayed seven pieces each and others such as Liam Belton and Maeve McCarthy had six. This does tend to unbalance the RHA's annual show and make it less broadly representative than it could be. The Northern show is however smaller in scale, there are 304 works on view compared to 565 at the RHA.

The RUA has existed in one form or another since 1879. It started life modestly as The Belfast Ramblers' Sketching Club. This was the result of an initiative by John Vinycomb, a senior designer at a Belfast printing firm. It started with 16 members of his art department who had been students at the Belfast School of Art. In 1890, with increased membership, it expanded into The Belfast Art Society and in 1930 The Ulster Academy of Arts, with Sir John Lavery elected its first President. Finally, as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951, the Royal prefix was granted by King George VI and it became The Royal Ulster Academy of Arts.

This early link with the Belfast School of Art remains as strong as ever with works by its alumni and graduates making up a high proportion of the show. Southern artists are also well represented. In addition to those who get in through the open submission process, the academy has a policy of inviting a number of Southern artists every year. Those from the south who made it in through one route or another include Amelia Stein, Bernadette Kiely, Francis Matthews (who won the KPMG Young Artist Award), and Tadgh McSweeney. The president of the RUA Colin Davidson has enjoyed the distinction this year of showing at all three academy shows. In addition to paintings at the RUA, and the RHA, his fine portrait of Paul Muldoon was shown at the RA's annual summer show.

Entering the 5th floor gallery, divided into three large rooms, the first thing that catches the eye is Dermot Seymour's Hiberno Hare - a large oil featuring a hare with a bloody wound on its forepaw suspended over a mythic landscape. You may miss the metaphor here but it's a powerful image notwithstanding. Nearby Colin Davidson confounds expectations by supplanting his customary portrait with Cloud - a dreamy and subtle landscape. Photography is very well represented in the show. Notable is a characteristically chilling piece by Paul Seawright which owes much of its impact to its title. In the same room, it's hard not to laugh at Oliver Jeffers Ginger Hitler - as if redheads didn't get enough unjust abuse already. Or maybe that's the point. Leonora Neary's These Rooms Within are two dark, cryptic works that evoke that space where introspection occurs.

Moving into the second room you are engaged immediately by that splash of red that characterises Neil Shawcross. He has two large pieces that dominate the space. There are also two fine luxuriant abstracts by Brian Ferran, one of which garnered him the RUA Perpetual Gold Medal. This room also features Be by Amanda Brooke - a striking hanging sculpture of a flock of birds where the attendant shadows play a prominent role. A couple of the portraits in this room give one pause. If the one of Paul Muldoon set out to be a Dorian Gray version of the poet it certainly succeeded. Nearby the portrait of Andy Irvine seems to have sucked all the strength of character out of that interesting man and left us with a weak-looking musician in a contrived pose. Two photographs by John Roch Simons are amongst the best things on view. These evocative images of an old nun carry haunting suggestions of a life wasted. A couple of quirky portraits also linger in the mind: Sheena Malone's Untitled and Lenka Davidikova's Joker. Francis O'Toole's languorous Dormit, all lush colour and eroticism, would grace any bordello.

The third and furthermost of the three rooms, whether by accident or design, contains some of the weakest work. There are a number of insipid landscapes and a couple of sub-bucolic renditions of domestic animals. There are however some good deeds also in this naughty room. These include Light Reflection and Into the Dark by Sophie Aghajanian and three cool abstract bogscapes by Jean Duncan

In general the sculpture is the least successful part of the show. This is partly due to to unsympathetic way it is displayed. Much of it is laid out cheek to jowl on tables as in a craft shop. Perhaps, given the constraints of the space, it was not possible to display each piece on a separate plinth but the the resultant juxtapositions are often a bit jarring. The highlights include Francis Lambe's Terracotta Sea Bean, Adam May's ceramic Cusp and Kate Mac Donagh's mysterious and elegant Sidhe. Two pieces reward careful scrutiny: Claire Gibson's aptly named Reflections and Karen Gibson's Chernobyl Metryoshka Doll Set - the porcelain dolls depicting scenes that are far from playful.

Print work is well represented. Elizabeth Magill's award winning Venice is impressive and there are two cool and restrained works by Keith Wilson. Sarah Rogers' Return to Hospital and Margaret Arthur's encaustic mono prints Reflective and On Thin Ice also stand out. On the video front those who check out Sizzling Babes may be surprised that the title refers to bacon rather than bathing beauties. They will have to content themselves with watching playful pigs run about oblivious of their date with the frying pan.

Looking back over the Irish art scene for the past hundred years there's an argument to be made that Belfast has been its epicentre. Paul Henry was born there as was Sir John Lavery. In the middle of the 20th century George Campbell, Colin Middleton, Dan O'Neill, and Gerard Dillon all emerged, a couple of them from its meaner streets. A little later Basil Blackshaw appeared - a precocious talent born into a sporting family in nearby Glengormley, This show gives us an opportunity to observe how the sons (and daughters) of Ulster are living up to this illustrious heritage.

Ulster Museum

Belfast

Tue-Sun: 10am-5pm

Tel: 00 44 (0)28 90320819

 

 

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Colin Davidson's Jerusalemites

Colin Davidson in His Studio 

A slightly edited version of this article appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 11 May 2014.

The genesis of Colin Davidson's new exhibition lies in a series of conversations between Davidson and the gallery owner Oliver Sears. The discussion began when Davidson sought a theme for a new exhibition - one that would incorporate the power of a unifying concept. His previous show at the gallery in 2012 featured a disparate collection of his striking headscapes. There were poets, painters, rock stars, and a few friends. These all worked well individually but Davidson wanted to do a show that embodied a vision greater than the sum of the individual paintings. Both Davidson and Sears share backgrounds blighted by sectarian conflict and it was not surprising that Israel was initially proposed as a theme by Sears. His mother was a Holocaust survivor. She was thrown from a train bound for Auschwitz and survived the war by being passed off as the daughter of the family maid. Growing up in London amidst Polish Jews traumatised by their war time experiences he admits to "a heavy and confusing legacy". For him the notion of Israel as a sanctuary for Jews is not an abstraction but a visceral reality. Davidson born in 1968, grew up in South Belfast during the Troubles and experienced there "a tangible lurking fear". His unease was frequently reinforced by the deaths of people known to him. Far from being embittered by these histories both share a passionate belief in the power of love and tolerance in healing their damaged communities.

Davidson mulled over the idea of Israel for a few days and then suggested that Jerusalem would be a less contentious theme. Israel is a divided country where many of the population don't term themselves Israeli. Jerusalem, alternatively, has a magical, mythical, and above all inclusive quality.  All creeds, Moslem, Jew, and Christian are happy to be termed Jerusalemites. Davidson is "interested in the common humanity that we all share" and felt this idea could be explored through paintings of people living there. So Jerusalem it was. They travelled to the city last January armed with a few introductions. The aim was to select 12 subjects - a number with obvious religious resonances. The guiding principle of selection was to make the subjects chosen as representative as possible of that ancient city. Many of those selected would not be comfortable in the same room, and indeed one at least threatened to pull out when learning of the identity of another sitter. The chosen 12 include a professor, the Mayor of Jerusalem, a prominent opponent of illegal settlements, two Holocaust survivors, the founder of the Israeli cinema, a renowned children's book author, a Nobel prize winner, a hotel worker, two doctors, and a Benedictine abbot. Sears handled logistics and organised the line up in a Jerusalem hotel where Davidson took photographs and did the multiple sketches on which he bases his paintings. Davidson returned to his studio in Bangor and worked his raw material up into the powerful, sombre paintings that confront you. A decision was made to identify the subjects in the show by their first names only. Those au fait with the politics of Israel may identify a few but I suspect not all of them. The backgrounds of the paintings are neutral and offer no help, the names may offer some clues as to religion, but only the apparel of the Benedictine abbot actually proclaims the man. The latter was born in Belfast around the same time as Davidson so they had plenty to talk about during the sittings. Davidson is passionate in his antipathy to divisive labels and gets "angry and frustrated with our inability to see each other as fellow human beings". 

One of the most significant moments in recent Irish history - Queen Elizabeth and Martin McGuinness shaking hands at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast in June 2012 - occurred  in the presence of an earlier set of Colin Davidson's headscapes. Afterwards the monarch was introduced to the artist and brought on a guided tour of the paintings which included heads of Brian Friel, Basil Blackshaw, Michael Longley and other prominent figures from the arts. Some may wonder why Davidson hasn't tackled a sectarian conflict closer to the Irish Sea than the Red Sea. The situation at home is in fact never far from his mind. He is clearly affected by his early experiences in South Belfast and he intends to begin a project involving events "closer to home" over the next 12 months. 

There have been many twists and turns in Davidson's career as an artist and he remarks on the role that chance often plays. Taken on by the legendary Tom Caldwell directly after art college his early work consisted of landscapes and urban scenes, competent but modest in ambition. He describes it as "genre painting". He also ran a successful graphic design company for almost ten years. He had his first solo show in 1997 with Tom Caldwell and became a full-time artist in 1999. His later paintings: the Belfast series and his Window paintings (urban scenes viewed through windows) were well received and he became a successful participant in the burgeoning art market.

In 2012 his work took a new direction - a road he is still travelling with his current show. He had met Peter Wilson (Duke Special) initially about 20 years previously and on renewing their friendship more recently he decided he'd like to do a portrait of the musician. He was an admirer of the music and also intrigued by his look: the velvet clothes, the eyeliner, and the Medusa hair. He decided that he wanted to make the portrait larger than life size - befitting, perhaps, his sitter's persona. He had been working on a series of large window paintings and found a blank canvas just under four foot square that matched his ambitions. This became the start of something big in more ways than one. He exhibited the painting at the RHA annual show where it won the Ireland-US Council/Irish Arts Review Portraiture award and appeared on the cover of the Irish Arts Review. Then Peter Wilson introduced him to Glen Hansard and the resultant large-scale painting was used on the cover of Hansard's best-selling album. It was also selected for the BP Portrait Award in London. His career took a sharp upward turn. Paintings of Paul Brady, Roddy Doyle and Mark Knopfler followed as well as a who's who of the Northern Ireland arts scene including Heaney, Blackshaw, and Friel. What was initially intended as a one-off became a new phase and Davidson embarked on a series of exhibitions and commissions featuring these monumental heads. Davidson likes to get close to his subjects and speaks particularly warmly of Michael Longley, a close neighbour, and Basil Blackshaw. He painted the last portrait of Seamus Heaney before his death and it's poignant to compare that elegiac image of the fading poet with Edward Maguire's 1974 version (in the National Gallery of Ireland) of a virile, ambitious Heaney complete with Beatles hair style. The latter a painting much admired by Davidson.

Visitors to the show will be struck by the sombre and reflective expressions of the subjects. The scale of the work (127 x 117 cms) means that this impression is magnified. Davidson's Jerusalemites are posed looking slightly away from the viewer so neither we, nor the artist, seem to engage them. He has captured them in the quiet moments of reflection and reverie. Davidson entitled a recent exhibition "Between the Words". When sketching a subject he usually chats away for a while but as he progresses lets conversation die and waits for that quiet moment when the sitter looks inward, oblivious of the artist and his activities. While Davidson is also interested in the topography of the face, it's that reflective moment that is the essence these works. That moment that in different people may induce feelings of meditative calm or gnawing unease. In either case it's a uniquely human experience where beyond the noise we feel more fully the fragility and transitoriness of life. T. S. Eliot took a bleak view of this moment in Four Quartets:

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

The 12 paintings are best viewed as one exhibit and would lose some of their power if split up. One piece alone is merely a reflective individual. Together they demonstrate that these disparate individuals, professor and plongeur, Jew and Muslim, share something unique that lies beneath the spurious labels and beyond the pomp of power. Davidson is eager not to be seen as offering any easy solutions. "It's important that there's no perception of being patronising. I'm coming at it as a painter, not offering answers". But of course the answer is implicit in the work.