Penzance, Cornwall, UK
Roger Davison
10/19/11 3:01 PM
There may be no macramé in Roger Davison’s pictures, but there’s enough shaggy hair and folksiness to definitively situate them in the nineteen-seventies. Painted with bold ultramarine and vermilion right out of the tube, his spirited cartoonish figures touch themselves and one another with a nostalgically uncritical free love. Thick black lines define everything, but stained-glass aspirations aside, what Davison’s bird-man, yogi, and spooning couple really need is a new storyline to bring them into the present. Though painted between 1999 and 2011, they feel as if sketched three decades earlier, however earnestly.
—Lori Waxman