Gene davis micro paintings

Though Davis began his career as a sportswriter, he turned his attention to art indrawn to what he saw as the musical possibilities of painting. His early work was largely inspired by the syncopated rhythms of jazz, and it was influenced by artists like Paul Klee and Arshile Gorky, who took an improvisational, rhythm-focused approach to art-making.

Davis had his first solo exhibition, a series of drawings, in at the Dupont Theatre Gallery, and the next year showed paintings at Catholic University, both venues in Washington, DC. By he had begun making his now iconic vertical stripe paintings, some of which were included in the Washington Color Painters traveling exhibition organized by Gerald Nordland, which premiered at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art.

In the s, Gene Davis, with Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis was one of a small group of painters called the Washington Color School who made experimentation with colours. In Washington he closely studied works in the Phillips Collection including paintings by Pierre Bonnard and Paul Kleeto which he later attributed his heightened sense of color.

Davis's first solo exhibition of drawings was at the Dupont Theater Gallery inand his first exhibition of paintings was at Catholic University in The Washington painters were among the most prominent of the mid-century color field painters. Though, he worked in a variety of media and styles, including inkoilacrylicvideoand collageDavis is best known by far for his acrylic paintings mostly on canvas of colorful vertical stripes, which he began to paint in The paintings typically repeat particular colors to create a sense of rhythm and repetition with variations.

The pairs of alternating gene davis micro paintings and grey stripes are repeated across the canvas, and recognizable even as other colors are substituted for black and grey, and returned to even as the repetition of dark and light pairs is here and there broken by sharply contrasting colors. In Davis created Franklin's Footpathwhich was at the time the world's largest artwork, by painting colorful stripes on the street in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Artand the world's largest painting, Niagara 43, square feetin a parking lot in Lewiston, New York.

Stripes are a recurrent theme in art history and he used it as a formal canon to examine various aspects of color using a reduced range of resources. For a public work in a different medium altogether, he designed the color patterns of the "Solar Wall," a set of tubes filled with dyed water and backlit by fluorescent lights, at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Despite their calculated appearance, Davis's stripe works were not based on conscious use of theories or formulas. Davis often compared himself to a jazz musician who plays by ear, describing his approach to painting as 'playing by eye. In the s, art critics identified Davis as a leader of the Washington Color School, a loosely connected group of Washington painters who created abstract compositions in acrylic colors on unprimed canvas.

Their work exemplified what the critic Barbara Rose defined as the 'primacy of color' in abstract painting. Although Davis's work from the s—mostly hard-edged, equal-width stripe paintings—is generally viewed in the context of the Washington Color School, his goal differed significantly from the other Color School practitioners. Artists like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland generally preferred what Noland called 'oneshot' compositions, mostly symmetrical images that could be comprehended at a glance.

In contrast, Davis experimented with complex schemes that lend themselves to sustained periods of viewing. Davis suggested that "instead of simply glancing at the work, select a specific color—and take the time to see how it operates across the painting. Davis is known primarily for the stripe works that span twenty-seven years, but he was a versatile artist who worked in a variety of formats and media: modular compositions consisting of discrete, but related, pieces that together form one composition; collages combining cutout fragments of images and text with painted and drawn elements; Klee-inspired images that resemble musical scores; and silhouette self-portraits.

His works range in scale from miniscule micro-paintings to mammoth outdoor street paintings. Works in other media include printed conceptual pieces, video tapes, and abstract compositions in neon. In keeping with his unorthodox attitudes, Davis's works do not follow in an orderly sequence. Davis described his method as "a tendency to raid my past without guilt [by] going back and picking up on some idea that I flirted with briefly, say fifteen or twenty years ago.

How closely Davis approaches true environmental conditions, short of actual construction of architecture, is debatable. In the sense that he utilizes pre-existing spatial conditions, he is involved with spatial reactions rather than in spatial continuums ; yet, his purposeful use of the specifics of the architecture as the point of departure creates complex transformations throughout the gene davis micro paintings spatial structure, achieving a true environmental modulation.

In addressing his attentions to diminution, per seDavis seems to be obsessed with intimacy as a visual experience. Smallness is so inimical to prevailing trends that I am fascinated by the possibilities. Persian miniatures, medieval manuscripts and Paul Klee afford a similar experience to some extent, but my aims are more extreme. Sometimes I do not even like it, but it makes me look in a new way.

The outcome is still problematical. Both areas are in an embryonic stage of development.

Gene davis micro paintings

As one approaches closer and closer to objects, details separate out from the total viewing field to command attention. Davis sees here an opportunity to establish both distinct whole as well as distinct sectional levels in the visual experience, each treated as having an independence and completeness all its own. For example, at a distance a striped micro-painting may exhibit an initial identity as a rectangle bisected by one single dark band but at close quarters it reveals an unexpected second identity when the dark band separates into a lively interaction of four or more stripes.

Furthermore, what at first appears to be principally a configural experience becomes one of corporeality as well. In intimacy, the material nature of things cannot be avoided as a positive factor in the visual experience the physical quality of paint, the scale of the canvas texture, light reflectance and absorption, etc. However, Davis is aware that detail, if allowed to dominate, could destroy the integrity of the work as a perceptual whole, that is, as a painting.

In his newest micro-groups exhibited at the Henri Gallery in Washington this August Davis continues his interest in scale. These works utilize small colored dots one to a canvas, to date placed either centrally or asymmetrically on small raw canvases. Designed for grouping, these paintings explore the space and scale impressions generated when smallness combined with the nondirectional character of circles are seen against varying sizes, shapes and placements of canvases situated in close and sometimes not-so-close proximity.

The dots are keynotes to this system. They provide a repetitive format in which extensive variations can occur. A central location of the dot at the implied diagonals of the rectilinear format restates the shape of the canvas; an asymmetrical placement of the dot restates its own configural identity. Both static and dynamic conditions can be easily established.

In any circumstance, the dot acts as a fulcrum around which rectilinear conditions are developed. Since the dot continually exerts an identity as an gene davis micro paintings visual form, the eye establishes connecting lines between the fulcrum points. Depending upon arrangement, these lines can reinforce by duplication or modulate by an overlapping process the rectilinear patterns created by the canvases.

The dots may also vary in hue, thus adding subtle or strong color intervals to the already complex pattern and spatial possibilities. The micro-groups incorporate and extend the visual qualities that Davis established in his series of micro-painting installations. In the latest paintings, however, it is the dots and the rectilinear canvases, no so much the architecture, which provide the primary co-ordinates and structuring of the visual experience.

Nonetheless, since the rectilinear format echoes that of the architecture, it is expected that Davis will unite these newer paintings into the architectural fabric of gallery spaces, thus promising even greater visual enrichment. Search Icon. Search for: Search Icon. Search for:. Arrow Icon. Current Issue. Follow Us. Email address to subscribe to newsletter.