Puddle Painting: Jazz

IAN DAVENPORT

Born Sidcup 1966

Ref: CB 219

Puddle Painting: Jazz

Signed, dated and inscribed on the reverse:

I. Davenport / 2010 / Puddle Painting : Jazz

Acrylic on stainless steel: 57 ⅞ x 48 ½ in /

147 x 123.2 cm

Provenance:

Waddington Custot, London, 15th October 2010;

private collection, UK, acquired from the above

A bold, vivacious artwork in kaleidoscopic hues, Ian Davenport’s Puddle Painting: Jazz reveals the artist’s technical mastery of the medium and ‘deep and abiding love of paint.’[1] In this celebrated series of works, Davenport pours ready-mixed, acrylic paint on to a stainless-steel panel using hypodermic syringes, forming narrow stripes or vertical lines down the surface. This rigorously controlled and precise process initially presents the illusion of perfection, but the artist revels in both order and chance, the unexpected and spontaneous ‘meandering’ effects of running wet paint into wet paint, tilting the panels towards the bottom to produce flickering edges, drips and splashes as well as glorious, marbled swirls. A riotous range of colour including emerald green, magenta, brilliant blue, orange, brown, yellow, pink and white lines against black expand, overlap and contract, before they feather and pool at the base of the panel in a delectably viscous way.

Davenport’s strident palette was inspired by the groundbreaking artists’ book, Jazz, created by Henri Matisse in 1947, with twenty brightly coloured pochoir prints made with cut forms of paper arranged into collages. Davenport’s audacious stripes reflect the vivid, highly saturated colours of the book in homage to Matisse, while both titles evoke connections between art and improvisation.

[1] The artist cited in Martin Filler, Ian Davenport, Thames & Hudson, London, 2014, p.12.