Jo Davenport

My paintings become an act of reverence for the landscape, a desire to study and observe the natural beauty and profound complexity of nature around me. I look for a point between recognition of the landscape, and the sensed experience of it. The abstraction allows for a layering of meaning that can be experienced in unison, the painting therefore is never static, yet there is an element of spirit too, in a constant striving for something just beyond the visible.
Artist Statement - Jo Davenport

'Davenport has arrived at this point through being a constant experimenter. There is never a sense of formula or unthinking repetition about either the physicality of the paint she applies, or the ideas and emotions that she digs out of her psyche. She is, quite simply, brilliant at it.'
Excerpt from catalogue essay 'Giving Back to the Land' by Dr Peter Hill 2024

'In her latest exhibition Echo of Landscape Davenport is careful to note that she is painting what she wants to see as much as that which she actually encountered at Fowlers Gap, which lies 112km north of Broken Hill.“My work explores the transformative potential of landscape – that feeling of joy and wellbeing you get when you’re standing in nature. And I feel the goodness of the land in terms of colour.” Powered by bold, active brushwork, these rich, vibrating fields of colour occupy a threshold space between the apparent and the implied, between what we perceive and how we interpret it.'​
Excerpt from catalogue essay by Tony Magnusson 2022

When I visited Fowlers Gap in NSW after the rains, I was struck by the fragile abundance of new life – inch-high river gums, tiny plants and wildflowers suddenly sprouting where just an inch of rain had pooled in the red earth. So many of these seedlings will never make it, yet a few small heroes will survive. That mixture of vulnerability, persistence and optimism stayed with me when I returned home to my studio near Albury.

Thinking of William Blake’s poem Spring from Songs of Innocence, in which spring and young children share the same pure, present-tense joy with no thought of past or future. This spirit of innocence, freedom and play has guided the making of these paintings. The first line of this  poem ‘Sound the Flute’, I imagine Pan, the Greek god of the untamed natural world, sending gusts of wind to scatter pollen and colour across the canvas. Working mostly in acrylics to keep the colour luminous and the gesture fluid, I try to paint with the same exuberance and openness I saw in Blake’s poetry – allowing the marks to celebrate that first exhilarating rush of spring.

I have used Japanese wallpaper to represent formal structures in society, alluding to highly designed interiors or the motifs in the borders of classical books. These paintings from the exhibition at the Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery was entitled ‘From my Window’ The scenes from my windows are now overgrown with the wild and expressive marks of nature - a re-wilding of society and a taking over of nature. These works also reference William Blake’s poem ‘Spring’ which references nature. I took inspiration from the pages of his poetry books, ‘The Innocent of Spring’ which he wrote and illustrated…many of his poems have been illustrated with borders.'
Artist Statement - Jo Davenport 'From my Window’ exhibition