Footnotes

Provenance
With Gimpel Fils, London
With Alan Wheatley, London, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Alan Wheatley Art, Alan Davie: An Inner Compulsion, Retrospective Exhibition, 18 April-4 May 2018, cat.no.30

Literature
Alan Bowness, Alan Davie, Lund Humphries, London, 1967, cat.no.452

Little Resurrection is the first of four closely related compositions. Grand Flyaway (Resurrection) (Collection of Detroit Institute of Arts), Flyaway Resurrection No 2, Fly Away Little Happy One, and the present work, all painted in early 1963. These four works display recurrent motifs such as a skyward reaching ladder, what appears to be a winged form or child's rattle and a levitating skull, contained in a blazing yellow pictorial space. In summer of the same year Davie penned a short autobiographical passage entitled I Confess. In it he poetically details his childhood in Scotland, early studies in art, wartime experience, and time as a professional jazz musician. His conclusion to this passage resonates especially with these four works, providing context to their joyful exuberance and themes of flight and rebirth. He states:

I married me a wife, and we went away together, and we found the mountains and the snows together, and the Italian sunshine, and the marvellous mosaic and the gold and white and pink and the bottlegreen sea. Then I really began to paint in the way I had learned to write and to play jazz and in the way I had learned to make love: and I learned that All is in me and I in All; and I discovered that I really am a child for evermore, and an animal still, thank God; just like them: my parrot my canary my poodles my dachshund my cats my budgerigars; they really know: and my little blond baby daughter knows too.
All the talking and lecturing and teaching and philosophising and writing mean absolutely nothing.

I discovered that I could be a bird (I had always longed to soar like the seagulls) and now I can fly amongst my clouds, and swoop and climb and circle in my big white sailplane.

How much more important than Art, just to be a bird.

(excerpt from I Confess, by Alan Davie, cited in exhibition catalogue Visione Colore, Venice, Palazzo Grassy, July-October 1963)