Pattern and Decoration
An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975-1985

BRAD DAVIS

Brad Davis longed to travel, but financial limitations forced him to miss out on the trip Kushner and Goldin took to the Middle East in 1974. Davis highlights his use of non-Western source material in compositional devices, patterning, ornament, and brushwork. From Islamic art, he began lookin at all kinds of Asian art. Shiva’s Dog of 1979 is an image of the Hindu story of one of Shiva’s vehicles or aspects; the dog and the bull were ways the deity moved. Underscoring this Indian content is Davis’s engagement with pictorialism and ornamentalism. His interest in Chinese painting and decorative arts was particularly influential on several of the other artists associated with P&D, such as Kushner MacConnel, Smyth (with whom he collaborated), and Zakanitch. However, his desire to look at Non-Western art led him to study first Japanese art, then Chinese art, especially of the Nothern Song dynasty in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the work of the “literati” (scholar-artists) painters, such as this eleventh-century handscroll painting, Summer Mountains, attributed to Qu Ding.

In paintings such as this one, the emphasis is on the lush beauty of the landscape. Fishwatching Triptych of 1981 also returns to the Islamic use of the pictorial with an ornamented border. Davis examined sixteenth-century PErsian carpets, many of which belonged to the Shah Tahmasp, who owned the miniatures in the exhibit “A King’s Book of Kins: The Sha-Nameh of Shah Tahmasp” at the MEtropolitan Museum of Art in 1972, inspiring to several of the artists for the flattened, almost abstracted treatment of space, the beauty of the surface decoration, and the incorporation of decoration, as seen in this illustrated manuscript example from the Shahnama (The Book of Kings). This painting also shows an inspirational use of space and a balance between realism and abstraction, recalling Chinese painting, similar to the kinds of works Davis considered. He used the rectangular format and the detailed image of the landscape such as that in Summer Mountains.

The salon-style grouping of paintings by Dais evidences his persistent interest in non-Western art. Top of the Peak, from 1980, was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the “Five Painters in New York” exhibition in 1984. Davis described “Desert Fox",” also of 1980, to me as a good example of a single animal portrait in the landscape. Two studies, Study Bird and Butterfly and Study Bird Flying, both from 1979, showcase some features of Davis’s process. They were for a large painting exhibited in a London show, and a subsequent print. Davis described the importance of exhibiting these works together:

This group [represents] a period in my work where the use of strong-colored fabric borders and animals were the main theme. This was influenced by a trip to India and seeing a lot of strong-colored folk art, plus a continuing interest in Persian and Indian miniature painting and textiles. The themes develop from Sufi and Indian myths and stories that often use animals as stand-ins for human traits. I wanted to create narratives that emphasize humor, empathy, and satire of the human condition. It was a way of extending Decoration beyond the standard floral imagery,which is celebratory but impersonal. The strong fabrics and salon hanging contributed to a feeling o intensity, joy, and fullness in the visual field. More is definitely better!

Davis’ reliance on the framing elements, the space, the formats, the motifs, and the imagery of non-Western painting are satisfying figurative meditations within P&D.