Degree: MA Painting
University: Royal College of Art
Graduation Year: 2024
2023 Freelands Foundation Painting Prize winner.
Sean Davidson is a painter who works intuitively creating semi abstract work. His paintings are multifaceted - filled with juxtapositions of contemporary life, history, and social media resulting in random yet complex compositions. His paintings play with texture, pattern and complimentary colour, offering the discovery of a new aesthetic. Playing with representation and abstraction, the scenes before us feel fractured and dream-like - expressing the personal alongside the social and political.
My process relies on the collection of imagery from my daily observation of contemporary life, from news and social media, and sometimes from historic images. I use the screenshot button on my phone for a more immediate way of collecting raw material. This also allows me to take images from cinema and short videos on social media, making the outcome random and unexpected. This process is not dissimilar to how I paint in that my choice of source image is a similar intuitive decision as picking a particular colour or brush mark to use. I often work from more than one source, pairing images and figures that have no relation to one another, to explore the range of creative possibilities and expressions that such juxtapositions and placements, frequently contradictory, may present. These expressions can be artistic, personal, emotional as well as social and political, they can also be indeterminate and unresolved, and they can be a combination of all. My artistic practice draws on an eclectic and extensive variety of artists. Discovery in the making of a painting is a driving force of my practice, which incorporates both abstraction and realism and the opportunities which emerge when they interact with each other. I have found that the necessary tension inherent in working with chance or the unknown has been especially rewarding in my artistic development. Drawing and representation has remained a constant and important discipline for me, stimulating me to explore both the constraints and the freedoms of working in figuration. I often use abstract techniques as the catalyst for the development towards something that may emerge in representational form, creating a sense of confusion between what is abstraction and what is realism. As a painter, I am interested in the technical aspects of painting, how the brush marks sit on the canvas, how paint is applied and the options that are presented and the effects that can be achieved through texture, shade and tone. For me, my sense of achievement is realised at the point when I feel that the boundary between abstraction and realism has been fractured and something unique and satisfying has emerged.
(2023) Freelands Painting Prize