Portrait of John T Davis - a commission for
@_winterpapers to accompany the written piece ‘Belfast Cowboy: The Life and Films of John T Davis’ by Peter Murphy
@cursedmurphy
I was invited to visit the acclaimed director, John T Davis, earlier this year in his home in Holywood, just outside Belfast. John is a gentleman and it was a pleasure getting to spend the day with him and create some portraits. Not to mention, it was an honour to collaborate with Peter Murphy once again for Winter Papers, Ireland’s annual anthology for the arts by Olivia Smith and Kevin Barry - available now
An excerpt from the piece by Peter Murphy:
“John T, still lean in his late seventies, with a full mop of grey hair and a bushy moustache, looks like the kind of character Sam Elliott might play in a country-rock bio-pic: all denim, cowboy boots and belt buckle, the legacy of a youth spent in thrall to western heroes such as Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger, and later, songwriters like Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. His cinematic vision has veered between widescreen Americana and Ulster hellfire, punk rock and aeronautics. His filmography is extraordinary in its scope: American travelogues like Route 66, an Atlantic Records history and the railroad saga Hobo; homegrown tales like the punk cinema verité Shellshock Rock and the mesmerising Power in the Blood, which followed evangelical country singer Vernon Oxford through the bars, churches and prisons of Northern Ireland. The Uncle Jack, arguably Davis’s greatest work, and his most personal, was set right here in Ben Edar. A major retrospective of his work was screened in the Irish Film Institute seven years ago - you can also view many of his films on the Queen’s Film Theatre archive - and he has released two albums of country-and-western songs, Last Western Cowboy and Indigo Snow, available from his website’.”
