Christopher Davison
Christopher Davison
A San Francisco based artist discusses timelessness, rainbow magic, and digging down to an essence of spirituality.
Christopher Davison is an American artist who spent a combined two decades living in Philadelphia and New York. He now resides in San Francisco. He has shown his work at various locations in the United States and Europe including Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in NYC, Mark Moore Gallery in LA, and the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts. He spent over a decade teaching drawing, painting, printmaking, and design to college and high school students in Philadelphia.
Mepaintsme: You recently relocated to San Francisco and have begun teaching at Ohlone College. Teaching seems to be an important part of your life as an artist. Can you talk a bit about teaching and why it benefits you as an artist?
Christopher Davison: When I was an undergraduate student I had an influential drawing professor by the name of Robert Rivers. When I first got to college I didn't even know that you could major in Art and I knew nothing about Art History. I was a blank slate. Rivers taught me that drawing was something that I could take seriously. The more serious I took it and the more I got into Art History the more feelings were stirred within me. Drawing became this mirror that I could use to look into my unconscious and bring forth images that, even though I didn't understand them, felt significant. Looking at this professor's prolific artistic output (etchings, watercolors, ceramics) and experiencing the huge positive impact that he had on me and my friends, made me want to head down a teaching path, as well. First and foremost, I teach because I want to share the same magical, transformational power of art with others. I want it to change their lives in the same way that it changed mine. Secondly, part-time teaching, while not lucrative, provides the kind of flexible schedule that allows me to give my art the time and space it needs to blossom.
MPM: I’m not very well versed in Eastern mysticism but I know that spirituality and transcendental consciousness play an important role in your life and art. Can you discuss how these ideas relate to your practice?
CD: There’s a long buildup that lead to my interest in Eastern thought (from having a very Catholic father who I didn’t grow up with, to living in Italy and bumming around Medieval churches, to realizations that I came to while experimenting with THC in the studio for about a decade). But if we fast forward through all of this, we get to a moment in 2016 where I’m standing in the basement of the Strand Bookstore in New York. There in the Spirituality section, I pulled out an old book by an author I had never heard of before, Ananda Coomaraswamy. He was the curator of Indian Art in the early to mid-twentieth century at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As I understand it, he wanted to be a bridge between the avant-garde artists of his time and the traditional art forms of the past. I’m not sure if he succeeded in this endeavor while he was alive but he was able to be this bridge for me, someone born thirty years after his death. His writings on Eastern Art in particular gave me the intellectual foundation to stand upon for better understanding the connection between art and spirituality. Joseph Campbell, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Carl Jung touch on some of these issues as well, but Coomaraswamy does so from the perspective of a bonafide art historian and art critic, intimately familiar with the culture of India. I still haven't met anyone in the art world who has even heard of him. I highly recommend checking out Coomaraswamy: Selected Papers, Vol. 1: Traditional Art and Symbolism.
MPM: Do these ideas play a role in your connection with ancient art forms such as Hieroglyphics and Indian and Persian Miniatures, or was it the other way around?
CD: It has really been about digging down to an underlying essence of spirituality (through art-making, reading, altered states, meditation, visiting ancient sites, etc.) that has naturally led me back up to the work that most embodies these ideas. I'm not interested in making something that looks like a hieroglyphic, or a Persian miniature, or a Medieval illuminated manuscript (although I love each and every one of these). Let’s take a basic mystical idea, such as: there is one eternal reality and all that we see or experience is but the transient surface-level manifestations of that reality. If you believe in that kind of thing, as I do, and many of these ancient civilizations did, then you are more likely to make an artwork that graphically embodies that view. Artworks from these cultures tend to have a more frozen, graphic, timeless quality. It’s a hand in glove kind of situation. Timelessness is a very important aspect to meditate upon while I work. So I’m reaching the collective surface forms through a common underlying belief.
MPM: When I look at your work, I can’t help but see a connection to the figural narratives depicted in Grecian vase painting, where full figures are often seen in profile. In your work, is the human body -- its physicality, gestures and interactions -- critical to the painting's energy and ability to communicate
CD: This question dovetails really nicely with the previous two and ultimately gets down to what the function or purpose of art is. We’ve all heard the saying that “art is a lie that tells the truth.” But what is truth and how might it be represented visually? I've tried many different artistic techniques over the years and I’ve taught many of these as well. I can teach a student how to create believable illusionistic depth (through linear or atmospheric perspective) or to model a figure so that it looks absolutely three- dimensional, or even photorealistic. Just follow a certain sequence of steps and with the right time and effort, anyone can achieve the same results. But all of these techniques are geared towards optical illusions. And if art is about Truth then, the way I see it, the less illusion there is the more truthful the artwork will be. So I’m drawn to flatness, pattern, surface decoration, clarity. It’s like I’m working out a mathematical equation in form and pattern rather than striving for the Renaissance idea of the painting as a “window.” I want my art to look real in the sense of being True. Both visual art and spoken language can only point towards Truth. And I just don’t think that we are even capable of knowing what reality ultimately is.
We are still too much of a monkey to approach a topic like this. Perhaps psychedelics can help nudge the monkey mind closer to catching a fleeting glimpse of it, but it will still remain a fleeting glimpse. Life is an absolute mystery, and on some level, will remain forever completely unknowable. So I want to make art that feels true, at least true enough to me, in that it whittles away as much illusion as possible. But I also want to give homage to the ultimate mystery as well. Those Grecian vase paintings both whittle illusion away and honor the ultimate mystery of life to such an extent that I find deep inspiration in them. And they are painted on a functional piece of ceramic meant to be used and not just a canvas to hang upon a wall? There’s still so much for me to learn from them. Writing this makes me wish that I could spend my morning roaming the halls of the Greek and Roman section of the Met.
MPM: Watching how you work, there seems to be very little preplanning. It appears that figures, symbols and images are arrived at through an almost automatic type of mark making. Can you talk a bit about this process-based approach?
CD: You are correct. There isn’t much of a plan. I’ve tried to plan things out better. I really wish I was one of those are artists who could flesh it all out, project it up, and paint it. But I’m just not. I’ve really tried! But as soon as I get the paint on the canvas or the pencil or ink on the paper, it just starts to have a mind of its own. My job is just to listen to the artwork. It speaks in a whisper and only tells me one move at a time. If I make it do what I want it to do, it typically looks awful (cheesy, obvious, a weak illustration of an idea). If I listen to the artwork, it becomes its own thing and surprises me. The art is the boss. I’m just the guy who holds the paintbrush.
MPM: Your use of color reminds me in some ways of printmaking. Do you have a background in the graphic arts?
CD: My MFA is in printmaking but I haven’t really made a print in quite awhile. Only this year did I acquire a little printing press for my studio (a gift from my mother-in-law). Hopefully, because of this, there will be some new relief prints coming out in the near future. But I often think like a printmaker, even if I’m not making prints. I use this transfer drawing technique when I begin working on a drawing and this technique grew out of my experience making intaglio prints (where I would start off by transferring a preparatory drawing to the ground of a smoked copper plate). But I was never really a printmaker’s printmaker in the same way that I’m not a really a painter’s painter. People say my work looks like illustration but I’m not a very good Illustrator either (I tried being a freelance illustrator for a few years, but failed miserably). Anyway, I would say that printmaking is a smaller category nested under the larger enclosing container of the Graphic Arts. I love great textile design, typography, vintage illustration, etc. While I’m a little too all over the place to ever successfully pursue any of those careers, I’m very inspired by their collective visual grammar.
Furthermore, for the last two years, I’ve been lucky to live in an area of the country where, when I go for a walk in our neighborhood, it’s like walking into a living textile design. There is so much amazing flora in San Francisco of such gorgeous shapes, patterns, colors, and designs that this too has become a new form of daily graphic inspiration. In New York we lived near the Met Cloisters so I got to visit the Unicorn Tapestries frequently. My neighborhood feels a bit like a real life version of those vegetation-heavy textiles.
MPM: I find your use of collage intriguing in that it feels like an extension of your drawing process as opposed to traditional collage. How do you see the collaged elements in your work functioning?
CD: When I’m working on paper, if there's an area that I don't like, I just cut it out. I keep all the little scraps in a folder in my studio. I probably over-edit my work through this process but I don't really know any other way to go about it. I never took a painting class and one of the results of this is that I edit my paintings exactly the same as my drawings. Instead of cutting out a rectangle I paint a rectangle in a flat opaque color over the underlying painting. When you see one of my drawings in person there is all of this physical history in the cutting out and patching of paper, but that history is less evident in the paintings. I've always appreciated Rose Wiley's collage-like painting process but when I’ve tried something similar it’s a little too rough-hewn for me. Using the word ‘collage’ isn’t exactly right. The editing technique that I use is more akin to inlaid wood. I put blank paper under or over the drawing that I’m editing and then I cut through both sheets at the same time. So I pop the edited piece out and I glue the blank piece into the hole that’s left in the original. It pops in like a puzzle piece. I then make my own "tape" with archival glue and paper to give this inlaid area as much stability as I can on the reverse side of the drawing.
MPM: Thanks so much for opening up about your work. Knowing that you have a young daughter, I have to ask; has becoming a father affected you as an artist?
CD: Becoming a father has made me a far more giving and loving person. It has significantly changed my life in ways that I never could've predicted. Being a parent is never ending work. It's being woken up at all hours of the night, being responsible for this tiny human being wherever they go. Trying to set a good example for them; it's around the clock work even when you could really use a break at times. And all of that hard work has taught me quite a bit about consolidating my time, being a better role model, and in general, it has activated a lot of latent energies that were within me. So I think there’s been a trickle down from that profound change in my life to the art that I make. I love watching my daughter draw and the complete freedom that she has in creating, unbounded by any conventions imposed upon her. It's very inspiring. She comes downstairs to my studio, looks at what I’m working on and freely gives me advice. She’s five, so most of the time she says that I should paint more dragons or depict something that she refers to in her own work as “rainbow magic.” I’m finishing up a painting right now (maybe you can see it in some of the photos I included) that has both rainbow magic and dragons. She’s to thank for that.
Christopher Davison’s work is currently on view in the online group exhibition, Slices, at mepaintsme.com.
More of his work can be viewed at the following links: