Existing comment:
Gene Davis: Hot Beat
Gene Davis (1920-85) created eye-popping works in the 1960s, a potent time for art an a crucial decade for the artist himself. His paintings from this period reflect a dazzling array of formats that he used, abandoned, and returned to throughout the remaining twenty-five years of his career. I have "a tendency to raid my past without guilt," he liked to say.
Early on, Davis wanted to be a musician, but he became a journalist, initially covering sports and then, as a White House correspondent, reporting on Harry Truman. Thus attuned to music and words, he played with both in the poetic titles that came to him, he insisted, as afterthoughts. Although some try to find musical inspiration in his stripes, Davis identified his color intervals in terms of space rather than sound.
When in his late twenties, Davis renewed a childhood interest in art and leapt in without academic training, embracing the moment's most avant-garde style -- abstract expressionism. By the 1960s he committed to the stripe, a motif he said "carried with in a built-in unity. And stripes feel right to me for some reason... They have a rectitude, an uncompromising quality... a monotony that appeals to me... If I worked for fifty more years, I wouldn't exhaust the possibilities." |