
Rob Davies – Watercolours
July 1st – August 26th 2023
Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead
Rob Davies is a Wirral-based artist who paints large-scale watercolour landscapes that explore and question the mundanity of everyday life. His works are subversive, eclectic and surprising. They are grounded in reality as a starting point but certain objects, narratives and compositions pivot towards the fantastic and imagined.
Davies’ initial inspiration is the notion of a romantic “sublime”. His artworks are eclectic, but mainly combine elements from semi-industrial and semi-wild environments into landscapes that hover somewhere between real locations and science fiction.
One of Davies’ interests is in the mind’s tendency to wander, its desire to be elsewhere. We often try to romanticise what we are seeing, or to project our thoughts onto what could be called ‘mundane’ environments. Locations such as train tracks or embankments become translated in these works as fitting starting points for exploring such inclinations.
Davies also challenges the traditional expectations of watercolour as a medium. Whilst taking influence from the canon of watercolour painting, Davies, particularly in more recent works, takes an experimental approach to composition and to application of paint. He combines watercolour with gloss and oil paints to create gestural, expressive marks and areas of pure colour.
“Rob Davies – Watercolours” will run at Williamson Art Gallery & Museum 1st July – 26th August. This exhibition spans 15 years of his work, accompanied by the artist’s own thoughts.