It sometimes seemed that Alan Davie was known everywhere western art is seen, from Stromness, in his native Scotland, to Sydney and São Paulo, which were among the dozens of cities and countries where he had solo shows; everywhere except in the histories of 20th-century art, when he tended to be granted a passing reference in lists of like-seeming artists, from the postwar European movement Cobra to the Austrian Hundertwasser and the abstract expressionists. The problem was that Davie, who has died aged 93, could not be pigeonholed. By his own reckoning, he was painter, poet, jazz musician and jewellery designer. Davie's admirers also had him down as a shaman and a maker of magic, and he was not displeased with this view.
His striking mane of white hair and flowing beard gave him a resemblance to God in the creation scene on the Sistine ceiling. His retrospective exhibition at the Barbican Gallery in London in 1993 was subtitled The Quest for the Miraculous: the miracle was that out of an eclectic art that was part Celtic, part tribal Hopi, part Hindu or Jain or Tibetan Buddhist, part African and part pre-Columbian, with a hint of William Blake, there came painting of power and individuality.
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