During this post-War period he produced paintings that reflected both his childhood in the grey iron town of Dowlais and the green landscape of his new life in Devon. It also marked an intense time of portrait painting, with influences ranging from Post-Impressionism to Picasso. His self-portraits from this period also form a small but masterly body of his work, in which the artist is searching out his real identity as an individual and as a painter in the aftermath of the War.
The 1950s saw a new confidence in Davies' work with the artist's style moving away from representational views; during the 1960s, he took an even bolder step towards abstraction. The boats in the harbour became fragmented, for example, and his portraits were pared down into simple geometric forms. In the early 1970s he produced large, clean, sparse paintings eschewing figuration entirely but, as always in his work, powerful definition of line was preeminent. Indeed, at this time he produced a series of spot paintings and sculptures - some twenty years before Damien Hirst would think of his designs. This led him to begin to work more out of coloured perspex and wood.
Davies retired as Head of South Devon College's school of Art in 1984. With less inclination to produce big paintings, he concentrated on woodcuts in his Newton Abbot studio. Davies died in 1996.[citation needed]
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References
Edward Clark (ed.), Thomas Nathaniel Davies 1922-1996. A Retrospective, exh. cat., London 2009