Peter Davidson - The Plum Tree 2
Pastel pencil coloured pencil on F4 pastel paper
Beauty in Delay - The Japanese Spring
The Japanese spring arrives in stages. First come the plum blossoms—my personal favorite—emerging as winter slowly yields to the sun. My work explores the intersection of nature and industry: rice paddies hidden in valleys and the railways that cut through the mountains of our populated landscape.
On my journey home from 2 Dogs Art Space in Akashi, I pass a lone plum tree standing beside a rice paddy on a gentle incline. I have studied this quiet motif in many conditions: the clarity of noon, the veil of mist, the silence of snow, and the deep tones of the nocturne.
My process originates in a method developed during my 1996 Master’s project, Object Painting, where I explored how a single motif could shift across different spatial and atmospheric states. These variations emerged unpredictably in the studio as a constellation of spatial impressions.
The work has since evolved through what I call Delay. Delay is not a measure of time but a perceptual field. By attending to the delay of the blossom, the usual sense of sequence dissolves. What remains is physical space and the sensory immediacy of pastel on paper. Delay behaves for me like mercury—beautiful, unstable, and impossible to predict. Each encounter with the tree forms a different spatial configuration in perception. I cannot control it; I can only describe what I experience, as memory and sensation occupy the same space.
As the blossoms reach their fullest presence before giving way to leaf and fruit, the motif intensifies spatially—a fullness of form and atmosphere rather than a moment.
There is also a critical point in the act of drawing. As pastel hues meet the pencil structure, the image approaches a peak of aesthetic vibration. One mark beyond that point can weaken the work. The hardest part of painting is knowing when to stop. With this plum tree and my pastels, I try to honour that spatial threshold.
