Five Painters in New York

Swastikas, fierce eagles, and a giant, wreathed dagger are among the militaristic symbols Brad Davis chose as the dominant imagery for his paintings of the early 1970s. They were curiously out of step with the anti-Vietnam War fervor of the time and remain difficult to decipher in terms of Davis’ stated intentions. Intensely iconoclastic from the beginning of his career, Davis has always desired wide philosophical interpretations, rather than strictly formal ones, for his work. About such paintings as Eagle (1972) and Guerrilla Warfare (1971-73), he explains: “Power politics and this luminous phantasmagoria become a metaphor for the balancing of opposing forces, and the light and energy stand for the unity of consciousness that is the context of the play of opposites.”(1) However the paintings are interpreted, their weird superimpositions of fascistic signs on a mottled ground executed in a lyrical abstract style are the startling harbingers of his extra-formal ambitions.

In technique, the paintings were an outgrowth of the abstract, looping, calligraphic work Davis had been making since the late 1960s, partly in reaction ot the spare, geometric rigidities of Color Field painting. His paintings of the 1960s and those of the early 1970s exploited the pictorial possibilities of an unusual working method. With the canvas on the floor, he placed large sheets of polyethylene plastic over the wet acrylic paint. The paint pulled the plastic down in a suction action, so that a marbleized patter of uneven opacity was formed as the acrylic dried. Davis would then remove the plastic sheet and begin highlighting and darkening certain areas of the all-over field by hand. This random ground can be likened to another kind of automatism — of manipulated materials instead of a calligraphy of the subconscious.

Only after Davis has confirmed the pattern made by the plastic and paint would he start to put down the centralized representational imagery. This he had extracted from various Nazi medals, in an effort not to aggrandize fascism, but to isolate its most potent visual symbols in a paradoxically lush, beautiful context. This way Davis meant to internalized the powers of the symbol, “to find the qualities of that kind of oppression in your own heart,” and thus invest them as valuable tools of self-awareness.(2) Another observer perceived the swastika works as “parodying, with an acknowledged contemporary symbol of oppression, the Formalist canons and strategies that…had led to the inner oppression of the artist.” (3) — a more worldly analysis than Davis’ own, but an accurate one. In Eagle, gold leaf burnishes the wreath around the neck of the huge, looming eagle, its wings outspread in a menacing flourish. Davis saw connections between the bird and the artist’s ego, an analogy of animals and people which played a significant role in many of his subsequent paintings. (4)

Guerrilla Warfare consciously evokes Jungian archetypes with its tangle of snakes writhing around an upright dagger that is pointed into a human skull. A murky red, blue, and green ground in this painting holds the more brightly colored snakes, an oak leaf wreath , and the brilliant gold-leaf dagger.

After two years of meticulous reworking of Eagle alone, and deep involvement in the series, the intensive labor and ponderous symbolism made Davis abandon both the technique and the imagery. He began a series of large drawings that gradually evolved from the all-over fields of the emblematic paintings into dense, floral landscapes. Around 1973, Davis had become involved with the teachings of the religious philosopher and Indian yogi Muktananda. He credits the yogi’s influence with both his new pastoral subject matter and its less strident style.

In Black Orchid (1975), the exuberant, writhing forms characteristic of Davis’ older work were transformed into idiosyncratic plant shapes. Vegetation of a most fanciful sort supplanted aggressive fauna and recognizable symbols. Quixotically asymmetrical and spatially complicated, these paintings were a breakthrough for Davis; they mark the beginning of the imaginary landscapes that became his ongoing subjects.

By 1975, Davis was associated with the group of younger painters and sculptors becoming know as “pattern and decoration” artists. He shared with them an informed interest in Oriental and Near Eastern art and a desire to reintegrate fine art with life, a desire manifested in his work by his use of common polyester cloth as framing devices for his paintings.

As his landscapes developed and became more and more embellished, they earned a place among the most forceful representatives of the decorative movement. First asserted through the application of gold leaf to parts of the landscape fields (a move he now sees as a “step backwards to abstraction” (5)), Davis’ decorativeness became more clearly apparent in the polyester borders with which he surrounded the central imagery.

The paintings assumed a more literal character as Davis sought to establish a particular time and event in each one. He began using real plant forms as models in 1976, basing his drawings on illustrations from a medieval herbal. The same year, with the sculptor Ned Smyth, he started research at the C.G.Jung Foundation library in preparation for a large room-size collaborative installation, called The Garden (1977). The two artists settled on Early Christian and Indian religious symbols for the work, having een “drawn particularly to the image of water— cleansing, creative, soothing— and the palm — fecund and celebratory— that these traditions shared.” (6) The ensemble mixed Smyth’s cast concrete foountain and palm trees with large painted landscapes by Davis— conceived as variations of specific Chinese and Japanese painting motifs. A dependence on silhouette produced a greater legibility, making these paintings easier to read then the florid, fin-de-siècle landscapes that had occupied Davis in the previous few years. He sensed that “the ideas were embedded in the style, not on top of it, so you could catch them through the mood and feeling not through some more mental connection.” (7) Spontaneity was becoming of paramount importance.

The five paintings that compromise the Ming Snapshots (1980) show Davis in a free, more blatantly decorative mode. All the paintings have a pink-blue, double banded polyester border— what Davis refewrs to ad the “somewhat brutish protectors of the charmed inner space.” (8) Each painting is a rapidly painted “snapshot” pf some exotic countryside idyll: oversize butterflies visit lucious poppy red blossoms in one; a water bird balances precariously on a reed in another; and an array of pastel colored plants enliven the rest. These are delicate, charming paintings that are as anomalous in their art historical context as the militaristic paintings had been. Perhaps the most fundamental commonality between the two sets of work was Davis’ continued, though greatly expanded, use of high pitched color. The horrific, hallucinatory glare of the earlier pierces has been transformed into another dream-like state, one altogether more pleasant, even ecstatic. But for all his interest in landscape, Davis’ palette does not replicate nature’s. His color remains artificial and psychological, rather than physiological.

The large tondi that also occupied Davis during 1980— including In the Daffodils, Top of the Peak, and Summer Wind— show how adept he had become at particularizing each painting, by means of light, implied season, and narrative incident. Summer Wind’s abstractly patterned blue-brown borer frames a dense composition that at first glance continues the border’s tonal scheme: a blue and brown hydrangea-like plant weights the painting toward the left. To the right, orange-colored blossoms spring from delicate limbs, and in a tangle of blue-limbed underbrush a small bird sings. A lightly painted yellow ground creates the painting’s atmosphere. It is a good example of Davis’ skill in dissolving from into an animated highly gestural scene that resembles the constant agitation of any closely studied scene in nature.

Top of the Peak seems to be keyed by color to the cerise and pink border that encircles it— but here Davis deliberately underscores the ambiguous orientation of the tondo: the magnificent pink flowers and the outcropping from the which they seem to grow are positioned aslant. Writing of this period of Davis’ work, Neil Printz noted: “He transposed the conventions of Persian and medieval painting—shallow, tilted spatial grounds, disjunctions of scale, saturated color, and decorated borders— to the scale of easel painting.” (9)

Beginning in the late 1970s, dogs as human surrogates figure prominently in a number of Davis’ larger paintings, most noticeably in the triptych Dürer’s Dogs (1981). For Davis the dog could symbolize many roles: “the rascal, the lazy bum, the noble beast, the longing soul, the sentinel, the sage, and the movie star. He was Shiva’s companion, a scavenger among the stars, a mythic beast, as well as the cartoon of human frailty and pretension.” (10)

Dürer’s Dogs, so named because the animals are quoted from those in Dürer’s engraving of St. Eustace, represents a reprise and reinterpretation of some of Davis’ early techniques and motifs. The print in the two polyester side panels, for instance, recalls his first floral paintings. The rushing stream in the background reiterates the importance of water, which appears as a symbol of oasis and healthful activity in many of Davis’ paintings. The three implausibly colored canines here keep watch, however comically, over the place. In their cockeyed zaniness, they are a long way from the eagles of ten years earlier. The light, candy-colored palette and the quick, masterfully rendered strokes of the painting testify to Davis’ ease with his maturing style.

More recently, Davis has returned to landscapes almost devoid of animal life. Evening Shore (1983) portrays water falling into a pool surrounded by curious, almost anthropomorphic rock formations. Bold strokes of dark paint, blues and purples, define the water and rocks, while various small strokes, some like stipple, activate the picture’s surface. A read and black border frames the scene and reinforces its dusk-like tonalities. With Jamaican Inlet (1983) and a suite of related paintings, Davis relinquished the applied decorative borders: he felt that “the center has been more secured, my relationship to the inner and outer work has become more clear.” (11) Evening Shore succeeds in establishing a single imaginary scene, while Jamaican Inlet can be seen as a compendium of Davis’ preferred landscape elements— rocks, small trees, and exotic flora joined in an extended landscape (the painting is 15 feet long) by a surge of moving water. Rushing, then still at spots, the water produces a visual tempo for the reading of the painting.

More insistently than any other painter of his generation, Davis has looked outside of the mainstream of Western art for his inspiration. He has tempered the rage of his early paintings into a body of work that is unusual for its deliberate exposition of sensitive personal insight. His attempt to harmonize ancient Oriental conventions of picture-making with contemporary vision continues to mark him as a lone; the unique and serenely beautiful paintings he had made since 1975 more than justify his iconoclasm.

1. Brad Davis, letter to Richard Armstrong, December 11, 1983; Artists’ Files, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

2. Brad Davis, interview with Linda Cathcart distributed by the 98 Greene Street Loft, New York, April 26, 1972; Artists’ Files, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

3. Bruce Wolmer, in “Reviews,” Art News, 71 (Summer 1972), p. 15.

4. Davis, letter, December 11, 1983.

5. Brad Davis, interview with Richard Armstrong and Richard Marshall, November 5, 1983.

6. Brad Davis and Ned Smyth, “collaboration catalogue statement,” December 1, 1983; printed handout produced after the exhibition by the Holly Solomon Gallery, New York; Artists’ Files, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

7. Davis, letter, December 11, 1983.

8. Ibid.

9. Neil Printz, in Back to the U.S.A., exhibition catalogue, ed. Klaus Honnef (Bonn: Rheinisches Landesmuseum, 1983), p.66.

10. Davis, letter, December 11, 1983.

11. Ibid.