"My existence has principally been about a constant quest for improvement"

This simple philosophy has guided Graham Davis throughout his career. Born in Kent in 1944, he began his artistic journey under the tutelage of David Hockney (an influence that remains today) at Maidstone, where he learnt etching.

After leaving Maidstone he went on to Chelsea School of Art in London, where the British cultural renaissance of the 1960s was in full swing, and was to impact significantly on the mood and tone of Davis's early work.

In 1970 he left the United Kingdom for Jamaica, where he was under contract to teach art for a year. The initial period was extended several times, until Davis eventually decided to settle on the Caribbean island, which he had grown to feel passionately about, and to paint full-time.

It was during the 1980s that Davis began to develop what was to become his signature style. Characterised by the artist as "a process somewhat akin to developing film" and one critic as "a literal expression of the sensitive unconscious being", this style, distinguished by its painstaking use of layers of evolving colour becoming vaguely three-dimensional works of art, though not entirely unique, has been moulded into a form which Davis feels to be completely his own.

As he finessed his style, he began to travel more, within and outside Jamaica, on a search for "perpetual inspiration". Old things: be they peasant churches, rusting doors or crumbling bridges, hold a particular allure for the artist. As his work came to be recognised not particularly for an identifiable "locale" but rather for a "state of being", Davis began to exhibit widely, in the Americas and Europe, to considerable public acclaim.

Always one to loathe inertia, the period since 1990 has seen Graham Davis experimenting with rich colour, greater detail and less self-conscious expressionism. These explorations have led to the development of an enhanced lyrical style by turn elegant, bold, and tremendously exciting.