James Davies

Toronto-born artist James (Jim) Davies renders nudes and landscapes using acrylic paint, colour chalk, conte, and Prismacolour pencils. Describing one suite of his work, Davies says the series “evolved from earlier themes of nocturnes, suggesting an enigma or unsettling presence…. I feel this work is particularly evocative and expresses… benign isolation in Jasper Park at night…. [T]he work takes on a slightly surrealist quality due to lighting [and expresses] detachment.”

Davies graduated with his B.F.A. in Painting from the University of Guelph (1976). The same year that he received his M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Alberta (U of A), Davies undertook a Young Artists from the Prairies six-week summer mentorship under Takao Tanabe at the Banff School of Fine Arts (1979).

Early in his professional career, Davies worked as a preparator and technician at the Edmonton Art Gallery (1980 – 1987), before starting as a sessional instructor in Drawing and Painting at the U of A and its Faculty of Extension (1991 – ). He also worked as a sessional instructor at the U of A’s Augustana Campus in Camrose (2007 – 2008), and at the University of Saskatchewan in community adult art education (2007 – ).

Davies has staged numerous solo exhibitions, including Smell of Pine and Poplar and Twilight on the Prairies at Edmonton’s Scott Gallery, The Blue Before Dawn at the Red Deer Museum and Gallery, and Restless Journeys at Amelia Douglas College Gallery in New Westminster. Two Edmonton facilities have commissioned paintings by Davies: a landscape for the Francis Winspear Centre for Music, and a painting/poetry collaboration with Stuart Adams for the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute. Dozens of public and corporate collections house his work, including those of the University of Alberta, Drumheller’s Tyrell Museum of Paleontology, Oshawa’s McLaughlin Civic Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, and the Provincial Museum of Kaiping, China.