Liam Davidson
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Liam Davidson was born in Australia in 1948. He studied painting at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney in the late 1960's before relocating to Dunedin to study printmaking under the tutelage of Marilyn Webb and Barry Cleavin. He continues to live and work inNew Zealand.
Davidson has exhibited widely in New Zealand and Australia since 1978, as well as becoming actively involved in community arts projects, commissioned works and community arts training.
Davidson is predominantly known for his stylistically recognisable figurative and landscape works painted in a process of layers, often using a liquid acrylic medium with pure pigment, calcite and Kaolin filler as both paint and bonding agent for adhering paper to either hardboard panels or canvas. The surface of each layer is carefully sanded back, so that his works convey both textural depth and a glass-like surface with none of the typical hard edges generally associated with acrylics.
As Davidson mentions, ""I have begun using more collected pigments, earths, from here and there. I'd like to use blood and saps and stains, but they just disintegrate. Tribal body decoration, cave and bark paintings, tattooing and scarifying are all inspirations as is the art of the Impressionists and Bonnard.The human figure under the sun, especially the bright subtropical sun of summer and the intense coastal reflected light of Pacific shores, is particularly motivating. It's a primitive form of sun worship and animism.