Phil Davis was born in 1982 and lives in North Worcestershire, studying Fine Art and Sculpture at Loughborough University where he completed his degree in 2004. Phil began his career as a commercial artist, his early works depict scenes from his local area, as well as places he has visited on his travels abroad, in particular Spain, Italy, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. His work uses intense, bold colours as a way of reflecting a childlike wonder in the new, and in a sense the extreme, sometimes uncomfortable emotional commitment involved in relating to the culturally unfamiliar. Changing to working largely with oils resulted in work of much greater vibrancy, and allowed the extreme emotional sensations in which he was interested to be committed more successfully to canvas. His work now strives to acknowledge both the positive and negative energies, the good and the bad consequences, of these emotions, and how they inform our view of the world around us. He attempts to inject this feeling also in his figurative work by representing the figurative form as an emotionally charged contradiction, and as a twisted and gnarled yet beautiful representation of pain and raw feeling, as well as an object of pure physicality. In this vivid mode of repesentation in which the flaws, contraditions and vulnerability of the subject are isolated and made to pulsate with renewed intensity, a mirror can be held to the life of the artist.
