Selected images of past works and series

Scroll and click on images below for larger additional images and more information.

Below are examples of past work from 1977 to 1997 reflecting some of the directions and changes to my work over the years. For the sake of at least a little brevity I have included only a few images from each period or series.

Certain influences remain consistent: love of landscape, color, pattern, and contrast.

A note: some of the older photographic images of these works have suffered over the years and I have tried to compensate on the scans as best as possible with varied results. I have included them anyway to give some idea of my past influences and interests.

All images © John Davison 1977-1997

In 1978 I moved from Southern California to Kauai, Hawaii. At the time I was making color pencil drawings on paper like these. I was attracted to exotic figures and locales, and borrowed images from magazines and old photographs.

On Kauai, images from my sketch books began to appear in my drawings, such as the banyan root patterns from Lawai Kai valley, or the rock outcrop on Nounou Mountain that reminded me of a gargoyle head.

In the early eighties I began to work more in watercolor, focusing on the landscape and elements from my life on Kauai.

"To The Sea," at right, was the first piece of mine to be purchased by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.

The "Site" pieces were a series of color pencil drawings and watercolors that documented various shoreline structures found along the east side of Kauai, from wartime concrete bunkers to more recent and temporary constructions.

Part of a series of landscape watercolors that were included in my first one-man show on Kauai, along with the Canyon Lines series next.

Landscape has become my primary focus, and watercolor would continue to be my main medium until the late eighties.

"Canyon Lines" was a series of watercolors inspired by the patterns and landforms of Waimea Canyon on Kauai.

The view from my back window into a dense hau tangle, became "Forest/Light," (at right), the first in a series of watercolors based on the rhythms and patterns of island forests.

The "Dog" series of watercolors were painted roughly concurrent with the Forest/Stone series. My dog appears in them.

I was painting fairly realistic (for me) watercolors at this time just prior to shifting to a new medium and a more abstract view of landscape.

These paintings are from a series of small acrylic works on paper that signaled, along with a new medium, a new direction toward a more abstracted view of landscape.

These five works, all from 1990, are representative of the direction my work took during the early nineties toward a more abstracted and stylized approach to the landscape of Kauai.

Occasionally travel and other influences found their way into my work. "The Messengers," below left, was inspired by trips to the southwest, and the native American pictographs found on remote canyon walls.

Though I was now mainly painting in acrylic, I still returned to watercolor occasionally for smaller works, and the "Broken Shell" pieces were definitely the smallest. These were actual size watercolor studies of broken shells, with most no larger than 3 inches.

I continued to work through the nineties primarily in acrylic on paper and canvas inspired as always by the natural surroundings of my island home.

By the mid-nineties I was doing do more and larger works on canvas. The ridges and rugged valleys of Na Pali coast became a prominent theme, as I continued to kayak and camp the coast several times every summer.