A First for Davis: A Show in Sag Harbor

[caption id="attachment_75122" align="alignnone" width="928"] "Bouquet" by Paul Davis.[/caption]

By Michelle Trauring

If Paul Davis starts by thinking, it is probably a mistake.

“It’s almost all based on a certain amount of subconscious emotion that you’re not even aware of until you get into the work,” the artist explained slowly, surveying a collection of his graphic art posters on his laptop. “As you go along, ideas float up into the work, and especially when the struggle comes. They come during the process. Anything ahead of time is never good — at least not for me.”

“So I wish I could tell you where this all comes from, but that’s the best I’ve got,” he continued. “The things that work out well all tend to have that aspect in them.”

On Friday morning, Davis was waiting patiently while a selection of his giclée prints were hung alongside work by artists Dan Rizzie and Jules Feiffer at Christy’s Art Center.

He would head over to the Sag Harbor gallery later that afternoon, just 24 hours before the show officially opened. The show that, despite his international career, would mark his first in the village — the place the 52-year resident has called home longest.

“The angle for the show is the iconic visual imagery used to express and reflect the times they were representing,” according to director Ashley Dye. “From Jules Feiffer cartoons, Paul Davis illustrations and Dan Rizzie’s use of classic symbols, all three artists recognize the time of which they create and depict it through the imagery of their own hand.”

[caption id="attachment_75123" align="alignright" width="511"] "Clown Target" by Paul Davis.[/caption]

Born in Oklahoma in 1938, a young Paul Davis never lived in one place long. His father, a Methodist minister, served at various bases as a chaplain in the Army Air Corps — most notably in Alaska during some of his son’s most formative years as a budding artist.

“He would send drawings of Eskimos and igloos, and I would make drawings of whatever was going on in my life, before I could read and write,” Davis recalled. “I don’t have any of the drawings I made, but I have quite a few of the ones he made during those years. That, to me, was the first way I communicated.”

While his father was never classically trained — unlike his mother, who was very accomplished, Davis said — he was fearless. And with both those influences, a 17-year-old Davis would pick up and move to New York on scholarship, enrolling as a freshman at the School of Visual Arts.

It was 1955 and, four years later, Davis landed his first job at Push Pin Studios, headed by the now legendary Milton Glaser — an artistic playground of sorts, and Davis’s launch pad.

“I was just starting out, and I had complete freedom,” Davis said. “I could paint the things I felt like painting, and that was what I tried to do during my whole career, even if it was for someone else or me. I always tried to paint the things that had emotional resonance for me. I felt that if I didn’t feel something from the painting, nobody else would.”

In the summer of 1962, Glaser moved Push Pin to Woodstock, where the studio worked out of an old barn for a few months. “It was an experiment,” Davis said. “I don’t think it worked terribly well.”

But it did inspire the cover art for a book of music manuscript paper that Davis was painting — one of his earliest pieces, as well as the invitation art for the group show in Sag Harbor, he said.

“The funny thing is, I can distinctly remember every part of that painting, even though I was a kid. I was still in short pants,” he said with a laugh. “I gathered a few flowers and painted them, and then I invented some of the flowers. In those days, I painted with designer colors — I didn’t have acrylics — so it was very hard to make everything stay down. I would put a varnish over everything to make sure the paint wouldn’t bleed from one coat to the next. The fact that that painting even survived is a miracle.”

Wrapped in a piece of the music manuscript paper, the whimsical collection of flowers is titled “Bouquet,” a painting that hung on his mother’s wall until she died, Davis said. In the years that have passed, the artist has experimented and his work has changed, he said, even to Glaser’s amazement.

“One of my newest pieces was for a show in Paris called, ‘Celebrate the Cities,’” Davis said. “They invited 39 artists to create very large posters that were put up first all over the Champs-Élysées and then circulated around the city for a month. I was the only American in that show, and what I did was so different.”

When Glaser saw it, he turned to Davis and said, “I would have never known you did this.”

“That pleased me,” Davis said. “I met this art critic in Italy when I had a show there one time, and he said to me, ‘You have a very active mind.’ He didn’t say whether that was good or bad. I think the artist I probably admire the most for the work he did in his lifetime is Picasso. I just admire the way he seemed to start over all the time, and I try to keep some of that feeling in my work.”

Though some common themes have appeared throughout his six-decade career, he said. As seen in the “Celebrate the Cities” piece, “Semaphore” — which features a figure, resembling “The Scream,” standing on a small rock waving a red flag, surrounded by water with the Chrysler Building behind him — a reoccurring clown motif has made its way into much of Davis’s work.

The revelation struck him again as he looked through the reproductions on his screen.

“I didn’t even think how many there were,” he mused. “I’ll tell you what it is. Clowns are such an overdone and cliché thing. I enjoy working with things that, obviously, a lot of artists have done or looked at or tried, and then I like to take them and make them my own in some way.

“Clowns signify so many different things,” he said. “They can be creepy, or they can be sweet, and so on. It also expresses the human dilemma in a funny way, because clowns don’t know anything about the universe.”

A year ago, the artist’s wife, writer Myrna Davis, attended a theater benefit and bought her husband a clown workshop in New York.

“It was one of the most fun things I ever did in my life,” Davis said sincerely. “It was taught by a professional Shakespearean clown. There were only about 10 people there and we did all these clown exercises. I was never the class clown, but some of my friends were. I was always a little envious of them — that they could do all that stuff and get away with it, and make people laugh.

“Clowns are the ones that say what nobody else will say and do the things that bring up all the awkward stuff, which is not me at all,” he said with a laugh. “But clowns can do that, and that’s what I did, too, during this workshop. It was so freeing. Maybe that’s what I like about clowns. They don’t always think, and they’re really free.”

“Davis, Feiffer, Rizzie” will remain on view through Sunday, December 31, at Christy’s Art Center, located at 3 Madison Street in Sag Harbor. For more information, please call (631) 725-7000.