Gemma Davies

Biography

Gemma Anne Davies is an artist specialising in name illustration. One of five children, Davies was born in Manchester in 1965. An art lover from a very early age, Davies was encouraged to go to University but not to study art as her parents were dubious that she would have the character to make a living in the cut throat art world. Instead, she embarked on her Economics degree at the University of Kent where she was obviously destined to meet her husband – they celebrated their 20th anniversary in 2009.

Davies began her career in International Banking in the square mile and it wasn’t until she began her maternity leave with her first baby ten years later that Davies had the opportunity to paint again. At this time, she had joined the NCT group (also known as the National Childbirth Trust) and helped celebrate the births of many of the group’s babies with a simple decorative painting of the new baby’s name – all hearts and flowers and not dissimilar to work that she had completed during her Art A-Level studies!  Davies chose unusual names for her own children and painted their names in a much more decorative and complicated fashion. Encouraged by the reaction of family and friends, she began to take commissions.

The new millennium and the decision not to return to the City gave her the opportunity to accept more work and her reputation began to grow. In the intervening years, her paintings have helped to commemorate every conceivable event from birth, religious rites of passage, big birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, all the way to retirement. Davies can capture everything from ancestry, landmark dates, hobbies, interests, favourite objects, family members and incorporates them into highly detailed biographical paintings. In Davies’s own words, ‘I have honed my skill over ten years and developed a really unique, fully biographical art form. I am thrilled to think that my paintings are on the walls of families in the UK, Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, America and even Hong Kong.’ As September 2009 loomed, a time when both of her children would be at secondary school, Davies was itching to develop her unique but extremely labour intensive work into a more commercial product. She realised that there were a lot of people who loved her work but a bespoke commission was just too expensive for the vast majority. The challenge was to satisfy demand at a more affordable price. Davies realised that she needed to devise a completely new kind of ‘name painting’.

Her children had both been very early readers which she believes was due to beautiful picture books which were available and phonic games that they loved to play. She was attracted to the idea that her paintings could entertain and educate. She developed a range of illuminated letters carrying up to sixteen images beginning with the letter; she imagined children sitting on laps pouring over the detailed, alliterative world of each letter, trying to spot them all. Without prescriptive text, the child is at liberty to develop its own story. Some children have even moved on to describing the images with wonderfully alliterative adjectives such as the bees, the dotty Dalmatian dog, the mischievous mole and the slipping, sliding sledge...