Gordon Davies – Garden Flowers and a Basket of Eggs

Davies was a man from Kent. He had an extraordinary breadth of gifts, able to turn his hand to any facet of the creative visual arts. He was a most distinguished designer (for Sanderson’s wallpapers), a painter (frequently exhibiting at the RA and elsewhere), muralist, illustrator (for Profile Publications), cartoonist (for The Eagle), with side-lines as a ceramicist (with Rye Pottery) and as an author (he published Painting in Acrylics in 1991), who kept a studio in Sevenoaks until 1967, when he moved to Ashford in Kent. He and his friends Ward and Norden travelled often to Italy, where Davies would paint scenes of the local surroundings, which he exhibited regularly at the RA until 1989. His work can be found at the University of Bristol, Canterbury City Museum and Wolfson College, Cambridge, among other institutions. John Ward’s daughter Celia said that ‘He was a very unusual man, the most light-hearted of the group, and one of the funniest people that I have ever met, yet immensely knowledgeable about the decorative arts, with a great capacity for friendship’.