Michael Davis
Michael Davis is a Sydney/Eora-based painter whose work centres on trees, those quiet witnesses to everyday life that line our streets, cluster in parklands, and punctuate the edges of suburbia. His practice celebrates their individuality, their strange dignity, and their capacity to hold memory and meaning.
Davis works fluidly between approaches. In some paintings, trees appear scattered across open, abstracted landscape, set within radiant planes of yellow, green and blue, their forms drifting in and out of clarity. These scenes are neither wholly real nor imagined. They evoke the feeling of walking through a park in half-light, or the way a familiar landscape appears when remembered long after the fact.
In other works, Davis turns to order. Trees are painted in neat rows or columns, each given its own space and attention. Rendered on dark grounds or timber panels, they resemble entries in a field guide—stylised but specific, with titles like Sea Among Us, Ghost Baby, Antarctic Beech, or Every Little Verb. These poetic names lend the trees a kind of personality, at once endearing and enigmatic. Together, they form a visual chorus—part taxonomy, part tribute.
There is a quiet reverence at the heart of Davis’s practice. His trees, often depicted without context or scale, seem to float free of time. Whether stencilled in vivid blue or brushed in gestural oil paint, they are painted with care and attention, as if by naming and repeating them, the artist is preserving something fragile.
Davis’s works sit at the intersection of observation and imagination. They reflect the visual rhythms of urban life. golf courses, median strips, verge plantings, and the emotional resonance of nature that endures within it. Through them, Davis invites us to look again at the trees we pass without noticing: to see them not as background, but as subject, symbol, and companion.
