Borrowed Blue: Archer Davies

Archer Davies was born in the town of Maleny, Queensland. He graduated from the QLD College of Art in 2010. Since then he has traveled and painted consistently. His paintings have been exhibited at Jan Manton Art, Chapter House Lane Gallery, Seventh Gallery, Well Studio, Tokyo, Oigall Projects and Edwina Corlette Gallery and MARS Gallery. He has been a finalist in the Churchie National Emerging Artist Prize, the Kilgore, the Percival Portrait Prize and the Rick Amor Self-Portrait prize, among others. He was a co-founder of A-CH Gallery in Brisbane, and currently represented in Brisbane by Jan Murphy. Archer lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne.

Artist Statement:

Look up in most parts of inner-Melbourne and you will see the decorative parapets of Victorian single and double storey terraces. On a good day, you can see their pediments, balustrades, urns and finials cutting a proud and eccentric silhouette against a blue sky.

My series of oil studies began with a fascination with these gold-rush era facades (c. 1850–1890). I was drawn to their faded former glory, their sunburnt, damaged and graffiti’d surfaces and the way they compress a European classical vocabulary into a hybrid, improvised architectural language. The facades themselves are not structurally integral to the buildings they front. They function as a kind of surface—an applied facade carrying symbolic weight. In the case of the single-storey terrace or ‘workers cottage’, they represented for their working and lower middle-class owners an aspirational alignment with European taste.

The parapets were often designed by draftsmen rather than architects and relied on British pattern books. They were then constructed by plasterers and renderers, using local materials and moulds for repetition. When viewed in a row, the result is a push-pull between uniformity and variation, with each house asserting a little individuality within a uniform rhythm.

The effect for me is a kind of civic theatre where borrowed styles act like a dramatic, symbolic mask for the house.

In approaching how to paint these structures, I returned to the charged blue of Bacchus and Ariadne. In Titian’s work, blue operates not only as description but as a pictorial force. Drawing on Venetian techniques of glazing, I place these inherited facades, with their happy melange of classical influences, beneath an intensified blue. The colour, like the architecture itself, is borrowed: carried across time, translated, and set against the particular light of Melbourne.