Peter Davis RSW was born in North-East England in 1953 and studied Art & Design at Northumberland College of Education before teaching in Cumbria. In 1981, he moved to Orkney, establishing a studio and gallery while teaching art. After relocating to Shetland in 1991, he exhibited widely across the UK and internationally, participated in an artist exchange with the Netherlands, and explored printmaking and sculpture.
From 2006 to 2008, Peter worked with Voluntary Service Overseas in West Africa before returning to the UK to teach part-time, later dedicating himself fully to painting in 2013. A founder of the Shetland artists' group Veer North, he has received Visual Arts Awards from Shetland Arts/Creative Scotland and has written arts reviews for The Shetland Times since 1994. His work is held in public and private collections, including Shetland Islands Council, Shetland Arts, and Smyril Line in the Faroe Islands.
A watercolour artist, Peter is deeply inspired by the dynamic and untamed landscapes of the North. For over 40 years, he has explored the potential of watercolour, drawn to its fluidity and unpredictability - qualities that mirror the ever-changing forces of nature. He considers it the most natural of all painting mediums, its simplicity of pigment, gum arabic, and water allowing for a direct imprint of movement and atmosphere.
Rather than simply documenting the landscape, Peter seeks to distill its essence, balancing abstraction and reality. His paintings capture nature's extremes - stillness and turbulence, solidity and flow - expressing the raw, elemental beauty of land and sea. Watercolour itself plays by the same rules as the environment he portrays: it moves, pools, dries, and settles organically. For Peter, this intrinsic connection between medium and subject is what makes watercolour the perfect vehicle for his artistic vision.
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