Ethereal Landscapes of Shetland by Peter Davis RSW

Born in North Shields in 1953, Peter Davis is an award-winning Scottish artist and member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour (RSW). He graduated from a course in Art and Design in 1975 and has spent much of his career in teaching roles in Orkney and later Shetland. Now a full time artist working from his Shetland studio, he has been painting Northern Landscapes for over 40 years and exhibiting widely across the UK and overseas.

When capturing a landscape which is so often dominated by water, it is fitting that Peter employs the medium of watercolour. As he writes himself, ‘there is a point at which the act of painting and the inherent action of nature align themselves, and that frequently happens in watercolour’. Peter considers this medium the most natural, allowing a symbiotic relationship between the materials and the landscape.

Particularly, it is his handling of this medium that pulls these paintings into the realm of the extraordinary, the contemporary and the experimental. Instead of traditional brushwork you will see expansive washes of colour, areas of pooling and feather-like, bleeding marks. Peter leans into the natural fluidity of watercolour and its obedience to gravity - expertly directing the water but also allowing it to flow unpredictably. 

This process-driven tension between order and chaos results in artworks which move between representation and abstraction - tugging at the heart of Peter’s practice. It is the ‘in-betweens’ that fascinate him, and the power of mark-making to create something new. The wild, remote and beloved Northern landscape around him provides a framework to explore the qualities and evocative power of paint. He seeks not just to record a scene, but to create something new. Moving masterfully between stillness and flow, these are ethereal and otherworldly paintings grounded in a sense of time and place.