Painted early in Alan Davie’s (1920-2014) career, Still Life – Flowers on a Table presents a richly textured and symbolically charged composition. A dark vase brimming with vividly rendered flowers dominates the scene, set against an arched architectural backdrop and surrounded by organic motifs and fruit. The work hints at Davie’s later engagement with abstraction, myth, and symbolic language. While rooted in the still-life tradition, the painting reveals the influence of Surrealism and a growing interest in non-Western art forms - concerns that would later define Davie’s mature style. As a jazz musician and painter, Davie approached art with a spirit of improvisation and intuition, often drawing on African and Oceanic art, Zen philosophy, and mystical symbolism to shape his unique visual vocabulary.

Alan Davie CBE, 1920-2014

Born in Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, the son of a painter and etcher, Davie studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1937 to 1948. Davie served in the Royal Artillery from 1940 to 1946. In Venice in the late 1940s, on a travelling scholarship from the college, he met Peggy Guggenheim, who bought one of his paintings and introduced him to the early work of the American Abstract Expressionist painters, such as Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell.
Davie attained considerable international acclaim as a painter and printmaker. His Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s gave way to a highly personal vision, encompassing within an abstract framework elaborate pictographic symbols borrowed from a variety of sources.