Theft: 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. Archer lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne.

"In August as I was completing this series of paintings I got a call from my mother in Queensland. She told me about a dream in which I had an exhibition titled ‘Theft’. This word, mysteriously, struck me as the right title for this show. 

Last year I had the opportunity to revisit many of my favourite paintings in European galleries. I was able to study, sketch and wonder before them. In both subject matter and technique these paintings filled my imagination as I worked towards this exhibition in my Brunswick studio. 

I began with the subject of horses. I was interested in their atavistic powers, the swooping line of their necks, their powerful spines bolstered by the explosive mass through the shoulders and rump - all unified by the gentle barrel of their bellies. The horse seemed neither male or female but symbolically androgynous. 

I started to reference artists who had worked with horses, in particular Degas and Velasquez. Wild things run fast is a painting that references Degas’ heavily reworked (and perhaps unfinished) The Fallen Jockey. It does this both in its composition and the horse’s head on the left which is a direct study from that painting. Elara, the model, reclines into the space in a pose inspired by a pencil sketch by Watteau - a preparatory drawing done for a painting never made or perhaps lost. 

I was drawn to historical works that were unfinished or heavily reworked - especially those of Bazille, Balthus and Degas. I saw myself joining in their struggle to complete their paintings. I was taking up the task of interpreting their meaning and reworking, cropping, cutting and copying them into my own original compositions often using friends as models who posed for me in my studio. The Young Spartans (1) is my painting of Degas’ preparatory study for his painting The Young Spartans Exercising - a painting that he famously reworked over many years but never completed. 

Finally, birds began to enter my imagination. They appear twice in this series. The ancient Greeks (and many other pre-industrial cultures) believed that birds were intermediaries, omens and messengers. The painting process had become a conversation between the model, myself and past painters - a search for worlds within worlds and a kind of painterly incantation. "

- Archer Davies