Getting to Know: Peter Davis

Having trained as a scenic artist in the early 1990s, Peter Davis has built a dynamic career creating large-scale scenic work for film, television, advertising, fashion, and theatre.

His artistic and technical expertise has helped shape visual environments for feature films, high-profile commercial campaigns, and West End productions, with film credits including ‘Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace’, Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, and 2026’s ‘Project Hail Mary’.

Alongside set production, Peter creates bespoke scenes and environments for fashion shoots and art-house installations, working between his studios in London and Berkshire.

While his scenic background has given him an instinct for both scale and spectacle, Peter’s personal painting practice is considerably more intimate.

His work is as much about touch as it is about sight. He combines specialised materials and finishes to create depth, warmth, and a distinctive tactile quality, using complex textures, tinted French polish, and hand-applied waxes.

The resulting surfaces are far from static. As the light changes throughout the day, so too do the paintings, revealing subtle shifts in tone, mood, and atmosphere.

Each work is built slowly and deliberately, with multiple layers of paint, polish, and wax applied by hand. Every layer is allowed to dry before the next is added, creating a surface of considerable depth, and complexity.

In effect, each painting contains a series of paintings within it, layered onto a single canvas to create its distinctive visual character.

At the heart of Peter’s practice is a desire for creative freedom and the simple pleasure of making. His paintings are intended as quiet visual spaces – a pause from the pace of everyday life.

Through delicate surfaces and glowing sepia tones, he invites the viewer to slow down, look more closely, and experience the work differently as the light changes.