In the studio with abstract painter Ian Davenport

Ian Davenport approaches paint like a scientist might approach a new specimen – it is something to be tested, something to explore and challenge. Painting has been the subject of his research for the best part of 30 years. He was a key figure in the Young British Artists scene in London in the Nineties and the youngest person to be nominated for the Turner Prize in 1991. Even back then, he was preoccupied by the relationship between shape, colour and material. ‘My paintings are about fluidity, movement, liquidity and how movement affects installations and spaces,’ he says.

His studio in south London is something of a Tardis. Located off a residential street, it is a vast space that allows him to experiment with different techniques and scales. Ian creates many of his paintings by pouring paint down smooth surfaces in linear patterns. In a recent body of work, these kaleidoscopic lines puddle in swirls at the base of each painting, resulting in something nearing sculpture. There are the diagonal works in which paint is poured from opposite sides of the surface and merges in the middle, then there are the Splat pictures, which he creates by squirting paint onto a vertical hanging surface and letting it trickle into random patterns. Each iteration is a form of experimentation. ‘If you get really good and skilful, you have to find a way of usurping that skill and making it fresh,’ he explains.

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Ian mines the palettes of other artists for his work. The Harvest Study (After Van Gogh) 3 uses the same shades of yellow, ochre, gold, copper and bronze that Vincent van Gogh employed to depict the countryside near Arles in the summer of 1888. In a different piece, he adopts Pierre Bonnard’s blues, lilacs and pinks. Other works draw on the colours he saw in an episode of The Simpsons, the sprawl of scarlet and green observed in a poppy field, and the purple and cobalt from a meadow of bluebells. ‘Lifting colours from another source makes for unconventional combinations that, for me, are more intriguing,’ he says.

It comes as no surprise that there is a gleaming set of drums in the corner of the studio. Ian’s work is intrinsically rhythmic; composition, order, timing and meter underpin all that he makes, while his colour combinations pulse and are made all the more impactful by their repetitions and reversals. Music, it appears, is an essential part of his artistic process.

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