Helen Little remembers painter Alan Davie (1920-2014) and posts a portion of Louise Cohen's 2009 interview with the artist. BP Spotlight: Alan Davie is on view at Tate Britain through September 14, 2014.

Little writes that early in the late 1940s "Davie set out to free himself from the conventions of picture making. Working quickly with boards and canvases packed around the walls and floor of his studio using large brushes and pots of liquid paint, he produced a body of work without any consideration for subject or form, discovering that images appeared to him in magical moments when he was completely surprised and ‘enraptured beyond knowing’… During the later 1960s when a younger generation of British artists were renegotiating action painting and moving towards post-painterly abstraction, Davie’s art began to shift towards a postmodern revival of figuration, narrative and mythology."