Gene Davis' Sky Wagon

Sky Wagon

Gene Davis: The Stripe Painter

by

Libby Clay

Gene Davis’ Sky Wagon (78.74) is on view after a long hiatus. At one time it was hung in the Peeling Onions area. Its new home is more appropriate, among the Abstract Expressionists, for it is a reaction to that movement in art. As the label will tell you, Davis felt that art schools were “grinding out little

de Koonings, Pollacks and Klines,” and that “painterly was used up.” It was time art moved on and explored other venues.

Sky Wagon is well worth the investment of some “looking time.” One of Wendell Castle’s beautiful benches is across from it, giving you two works of art at once. It is the combination of vertical colors that catches you first, makes you wonder what it is about, and makes you wonder why the artist chose to express himself this way. As you continue to study the painting, it may seem to “wiggle,” This was not the artist’s intent, but it turned out to be the effect.

The painting is acrylic on canvas, but the canvas had to be re-stretched. As you spend more time with it, you begin to wonder whether Davis used a ruler to make the stripes so even and so “neat.” (He used masking tape.) Look closely. In Sky Wagon, he went a little over the line on some of the stripes, and they are not all the same width. He did not plan his color combinations ahead; the choices were intuitive. Said Davis, “Asking how I choose my colors is like asking a chicken how she lays an egg. I can’t explain it.”                                                          

Davis was a Washington, D.C. native, born there in 1920. He was educated at the University of Maryland and Wilson Teacher’s College, and his first career was as a journalist and writer. Painting came much later. As a brash young man of 19, he talked the city editor of the now-defunct Washington Daily News into giving him a try as a sports reporter. Davis didn’t really know anything about sports writing, so he bought a book called Interpretive Reporting, read it in one night, and the next day began covering Washington Redskins games and other sports events. Eventually, at age 25, he covered the White House and got to travel with the President.

He was also writing poems and submitting them for publication in small poetry magazines. He was an idealistic youth, and the subject matter of many poems was racial prejudice. He also wrote fiction--mostly pulp (so-called because the paper was of poor quality and the fiction often lurid or sensational) and mysteries. You were paid a penny a word for pulp fiction, so “the more wordy you were, the more you were paid,” said Davis in an interview.

                                                     

He continued his journalistic career, working for many newspapers. He worked at everything from copy boy to rewrite to reporting. This career earned him a living for about 35 years, when he could finally afford to give it up and concentrate on painting full time. It also gave him experiences that fueled his artistic imagination.                                                            

                                                          

Aside from a few high school art lessons, Gene Davis was self-taught. He had been laboring at art for years and was helped by his friendship with Jacob Kainen, then Curator of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian and an artist in his own right. Kainen became a mentor and together they often visited the Phillips and Corcoran Galleries, analyzing and discussing the art. Kainen offered advice and encouragement and “opened my (Davis’) eyes” to modern painting.

Davis knew the work of other artists such as Pollock and deKooning. His work of the early 1950s he described as “expressionist abstraction.” He also tried painting heavily-textured paintings with additives of rocks and gravel and poured paint…one weighed 65 pounds! He went through a variety of modes or manners up until late 1958. At this time he rejected the “virtuosity” of such artists as de Kooning and began to rely on his own intuition and profound affinity for color. This was a breakthrough. He was not so much rejecting expressionism as he was learning to trust his own talents and move on.

In 1958  Davis painted “out of whim” an edge-to-edge, equal width stripe painting. As he conceived it, the “stripe” was a point of departure from Barnett Newman’s work and posed an alternative to expressionism. Gradually, in 1959 and ’60, Davis began to see the stripe only as color, independent of its shape. He also experimented with varying the width of the stripe--sometimes pencil-thin, sometimes thick.

Davis never knew what was going to come out when he started. Each group of stripes is based on the effect the last group or stripe had. The painting changed character as he went along. He was concerned simply with color interval. He said he painted to surprise himself. Space didn’t concern him, only color. For him, the essential rhythms of the painting were the lateral rhythms in a single plane.

For a time Davis did “micro-paintings,” so small (less than one inch) that he used a microscope to paint them. However, they proved very tempting to “pocket” when they were exhibited in galleries. He is better known for his large paintings. He did a 60-foot mural for the South Mall Project in Albany. Most spectacular of all was the 31,464-foot parking lot of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, done in 1973. There are 414 stripes. He used more than 400 gallons of soya-alkyd traffic paint, 12 miles of masking tape and “a lot of stooping.”

Davis’ suggestion was that “one must enter the painting through the door of a single color. Instead of just glancing, select a color such as yellow or lime green and then take the time to see how it operates across the painting. Approached this way, something happens.”  Try it with Sky Wagon.

Gene Davis died in 1985 in Washington. By the way, Gene and Flo Davis’ living room was devoid of color: white walls, white couch, white carpet. Even his Jaguar XKE was white.