Figure and landscape painter, born in Shipley Moor, Yorkshire, who refused to exploit his art to live, shunning dealers and critics, believing that his pictures were sufficient without their promotion and interpretation. Davy studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, 1943–5, during its wartime relocation to Oxford, also taking lectures in philosophy. It remained his life’s preoccupation. His father Hubert, who taught art, and his mother Dorothy, daughter of the artist Henry Thurlow Hunt, were Theosophists. Apart from John Latham and Kyffin Williams, Leo’s close friends were philosophers rather than artists: John Tucker, who became professor of philosophy at Waterloo University in Canada and R D Laing, author of Self and Other and Knots.
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Davy taught art for a few years at St Aloysius Boys’ School, Highgate, but found this interfered with his painting. When he met Antonia Davy in 1955 he was a part-time packer in a health food store, paying £2 a week for bed and breakfast and a bare room, painting in his overcoat to save fuel. In 1959, Davy learned frame-making and after that earned what he needed by gilding, carving and restoring. The Davys moved to north Cornwall in 1968 and in 1969 he had a first show at the Beaford Centre, north Devon. There was a posthumous show at Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, in 1990. Piano Nobile Fine Paintings latterly represented his estate. Davy’s work defies easy interpretation, although Antonia Davy believed that “he was looking for a way to express the relationships that preoccupied him: between inner and outer, self and not-self, experience and reality.” Davy’s early self-portrait is included in Philip Vann’s book Face to Face, published by Sansom & Company/Piano Nobile in 2004.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
