Though the work does stretch back twenty years, there is a particular resonance with our own reality here. In an interview with artnet in 2016, he said that he had a goal to find an “alternate head space from which I can conceive my work.” Part of that would be projecting and striving more toward optimism in his work, he said at the time. When asked today if he was successful in that pursuit, he said he has a feeling that it’s more of a “slow evolution” than arriving somewhere new. “I’d probably like a drastic shift, but I have a feeling I was responding to the fact that my work, subject wise, went from speculative to being a little too on-the-nose, simply because reality became stranger and scarier and it suddenly felt a little closer to my work than I anticipated,” he says. “I wanted my paintings to be weirder and harder to read because I was worried that they would feel too topical. The things I was saying regarding power and resources and greed were staring me in the face, whereas previously I was sort of worrying about the possibility of them occurring. I guess there’s always a bit of dissatisfaction with this or that in my paintings. There’s always some other place I wish they would go. I think the things I’m thinking about subject wise are sort of eternal. They have to do with human nature. People have been greedy and vain and all these things forever.”
USUALLY THE PEOPLE IN MY PAINTINGS AREN’T WORKING VERY HARD … THEY’VE SHOWN UP, BUT THEY DON’T KNOW WHY, OR THEY’VE GOTTEN THE WRONG ASSIGNMENT.”
Whether filling indoor swimming pools or carrying massive ocean liners, water seems to be a subject to which Davis often returns. The painter says he enjoys the countless connotations of water, and sometimes just the act of rendering it is enticing. “Floods are also biblical, but are also urgent and relevant as a warning,” he says. “Swimming pools are a totally different use for water—the opposite of a flood. Floods are out of control, pools are the harnessing of water. They can represent all sorts of things as well. Water can mean disaster, or baptism, or paradise, all kinds of things. Obviously, I like symbols and allegories. It is also interesting to work with water for formal reasons, just as an excuse to use a certain color or paint reflections and things popping out of the water. My paintings are how they are for formal reasons as much as anything else. Wanting to see something submerged is as good a reason to make a painting as anything.”
For those of us that are more cynical than patriotic, it’s also easy to project a wholly American sensibility in these paintings. International audiences might feel differently about that, but Davis can only speak for his own intentions, rather than offer conjecture on anyone else’s sense of place: “I don’t make much of an effort to locate my paintings in a specific place or time,” he says. “Sometimes I avoid these specifics altogether. I can’t help having an American sensibility because that is how I’m conditioned, but these situations I’m describing are certainly relevant to other people in other places. The people in them aren’t ‘Americans’ per se.”
In the end, Davis (like anyone else) can really only speak for his own perception. And that is rooted in the harmony between two strange bedfellows in the artist’s paintings: “My favorite things are beautiful but have a bit of darkness,” he says. “Like pretty songs about killing the queen. It’s
easier for me to think about this in terms of music, like ‘Forever Changes’ by Love. That’s sort of the ideal for me. I’d like my paintings to look like that music sounds to me. I try to make beautiful paintings, but the situations I’m describing are often dead serious or sinister. I don’t really know how other people perceive them. I think it’s safe to say that they don’t see them the same way I do.”
So if you’re looking for a precise meaning in any of Davis’s work, you’re already in a different mindset than the artist himself. “When I look at art, it rarely occurs to me to think about what a painting is about,” Davis says. “I have to assume that some people look at my work the same way. Other people want things explained. I think I’ve done a pretty good job ‘describing’ but I’m not explaining.”*
This article first appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 79, which is sold out. Subscribe to Hi-Fructose here and get our latest issue, delivered right to your mailbox.
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