Alan Davie interview: Outsider looking in

The Scotsman's chief art critic Duncan Macmillan, meanwhile, credits Davie with being one of the first British artists to engage with European modernism after the end of the Second World War. You'd think that such an important figure would be a local celebrity wherever he lived, with art-loving pilgrims regularly beating a path to his door. But at the Goat pub in Hertford Heath, a quintessential English country boozer just a short drive from Davie's Hertfordshire home, nobody seems to have heard of him. It's very strange – a bit like turning up in Antibes looking for the Picasso museum, only to be met with blank stares and people saying, "Sorry? Pablo who?"

Now 89 years of age but still surprisingly sprightly, Davie has been based in a converted stable block near Hertford Heath since 1954. Until recently he lived there with his wife, Bili, but she died a couple of years ago, so now it's just the artist and his work. Tucked away towards the end of a leafy, single-track lane, the house isn't exactly the kind of place you'd stumble across by accident, but no doubt the obscure, slightly magical location is part of its appeal.

Davie may be approaching his 90th birthday, but he is still incredibly prolific. In his studio he shows me dozens of recent canvasses, each one more crazily inventive than the last – products of his ongoing attempts to "bamboozle" his conscious mind into letting his unconscious take over.

"I don't know where it all comes from," he says softly, almost apologetically, when I express my bafflement at the sheer, joyous bonkers-ness of it all.

Sitting on one of the work surfaces in the studio, alongside books on tattooing and primitive art, are piles and piles of densely patterned biro drawings, each one of which could potentially provide the spark for a full-scale painting. And then, just when I'm starting to suffer from sensory overload, the artist shows me into his store room – a real Aladdin's cave jammed to the rafters with hundreds of large canvasses.

"I'd really like to have a big retrospective before I die," he says, wistfully, "but I'm not sure if that will happen."

The National Galleries of Scotland already own a representative cross-section of Davie's work, but they should really think of sending a buyer to Davie's home – there's a sell-out Edinburgh Festival show here just waiting to be unleashed. In fact, Davie could probably fill the Dean Gallery and the SNGMA five times over and still have a few works to spare.

There may not be a major Davie blockbuster on the horizon just yet, but there are going to be two substantial exhibitions of his work in Scotland in the next few months. In August, the plush new Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh will play host to a show called The Creative World of Alan Davie, combining tapestry renderings of Davie designs with original works in various other media. But before that, in an exhibition beginning tomorrow, the Art Extraordinary Gallery in Pittenweem will show a selection of Davie's recent paintings – characteristically energetic works in vibrant colours, with titles like Leap for Joy and Battle of the Imps.

The choice of gallery is significant. Curated by Joyce Laing, a former art therapist, the Art Extraordinary Gallery specialises in Outsider Art, also known as Art Brut. When the French artist Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut, he meant it to describe art made outside the boundaries of "official" culture, with specific emphasis on the inmates of insane asylums. The English term Outsider Art is more commonly used now, and is usually applied more broadly, to encompass self-taught artists as well as the mentally ill.

Davie studied at Edinburgh College of Art, so can he really be considered an outsider artist? Joyce Laing certainly thinks he can. "I've got a fairly tight definition of what it means to be an outsider artist, which is very much Dubuffet's," she says. "Of course, time has altered it a little. Dubuffet said they had to be "untrained", but you can't be untrained now – even if you're mentally ill, a social worker will find you and get you into a school. So I have altered that to say no, they don't necessarily have to be untrained, but none of them could work a day in Tesco's."

It's certainly hard to imagine Davie sitting behind a supermarket checkout, but does he think of himself as an outsider artist? "Yes, absolutely," he says, "I definitely fall into that category."

Although Davie attended ECA from 1938 to 1941, his time there is probably best described as "problematic". Or, as Elliott puts it, "when he was at art school he slightly sidestepped the whole thing."

Some of the more academic members of staff wanted him to paint only what he could see, but all Davie wanted to do was find ways of responding to the far more interesting things going on inside his head.

"The teachers there (at ECA] really kicked up hell because I was doing life painting and I used to use all sorts of violent colours," he says. "There were some terrible rows. They tried to push me out of the college. Fortunately, the principal was very sympathetic," he chuckles, "putting up with this crazy character."

Having identified himself as an outsider from the start, Davie seems to have been quite happy to remain on the peripheries of the art world ever since, getting on with his own work without paying too much attention to what other people are doing.

After the war, when he served as an anti-aircraft gunner, he made a living working as a jazz musician (he still noodles on his grand piano for three hours every day) and making and selling jewellery ("I used to make rings for myself to wear – I was a real romantic dandy – I used to wear about six at once").

Then, in 1956, he visited New York for the first time, where he was introduced to various abstract expressionists including Jackson Pollock, who spent a weekend showing him around Long Island.

Although he was soon being talked about as "one of the abstract expressionists", Davie says he never felt part of a movement as such – he merely recognised some similarities between what he was doing and what his American counterparts were up to, particularly in his attempts to produce art unconsciously.

"Art is something which happens to me," Davie once wrote, "not something I make happen – therefore it's 'artless'."

Those keen to put artists into neat boxes have also lumped Davie together with the St Ives Set, the group headed by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth who helped turn a sleepy Cornish fishing town into a world-famous centre for avant garde art after the war.

However, although Davie bought a house near Land's End in the early 1960s, he claims that, here too, he was an outsider – emphatically not part of the gang.

According to Patrick Elliott, this is no reflection of the hospitability or otherwise of the St Ives artists – Davie just doesn't tend to associate himself with any modern western artists.

"I think he'd probably say he had more in common with cavemen or aboriginal painters than he does with Damien Hirst or Francis Bacon," he says." He sees himself in a global tradition rather than a western art tradition."

He certainly doesn't seem to see much point in art theory: when I ask him if he has ever read anything about his work that he thinks explains it adequately, the answer is an unequivocal "no". And Elliott's right: when Davie does try to put his art in context, it's not in reference to his contemporaries but to primitive artists.

"To think about the origins of art..." he muses, "one imagines a primitive man in a cave... the cave walls are dusty… he accidentally makes a couple of marks on the wall and suddenly he sees in these marks an animal. 'Look!' he says to his friends, 'Come and look at this! Magic!' So they start making more marks, and they think, 'we can make this magic work for us'. It's wonderful to think of it. Extraordinary."

• Alan Davie is at the Art Extraordinary Gallery, Pittenweem, from tomorrow. Patrick Elliott will give a lecture titled "Alan Davie and the art of trying not to think" at the School of Art History, University of St Andrews, 13 May; The Creative World of Alan Davie is at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, 5 August to 26 September.