Attributed to Alan Davie, no coa, private collection, medium: oil measurements: 23"WX29"H framed, good condition Biography: James Alan Davie was a Scottish painter and musician. Davie was born in Grangemouth, Scotland in 1920, the son of Elizabeth (née Turnbull) and James William Davie, an art teacher and painter who exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1925] Alan Davie studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1937 to 1941. An early exhibition of his work came through the Society of Scottish Artists.After the Second World War, Davie played tenor saxophone in the Tommy Sampson Orchestra, which was based in Edinburgh and broadcast and toured in Europe.He also earned a living making jewellery during the postwar period.Davie travelled widely and in Venice became influenced by other painters of the period, such as Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock and Joan Miró, as well as by a wide range of cultural symbols.In particular, his painting style owes much to his affinity with Zen. Having read Eugen Herrigel's book Zen in the Art of Archery (1953), he assimilated the spontaneity which Zen emphasises.: Declaring that the spiritual path is incompatible with planning ahead, he attempted to paint as automatically as possible, which was intended to bring forth elements of his unconscious. In this, he shared a vision with surrealist painters such as Miró, and he was also fascinated by the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung.Like Pollock, many of Davie's works were executed by standing above the painting, which was laid on the ground. He added layers of paint until sometimes the original painting had been covered over many times. Despite the speed at which he worked (he usually had several paintings on the go at once), however, he was adamant that his images are not pure abstraction, but all have significance as symbols.Championing the primitive, he saw the role of the artist as akin to that of the shaman,and remarked upon how disparate cultures have adopted common symbols in their visual languages.