Hammer Time

Hammer :: Oil and Latex on Canvas :: 48” x 48” :: 1981

Once I drove from Minneapolis to Bend in a cargo van loaded with artwork because everything was going to be installed in a show. I had four boxes of framed ink drawings, three five-foot square wrapped canvases, and a couple of smaller paintings. The three larger canvases could only fit diagonally in the space, so it looked a little inefficient, but they fit, with room for a couple of smaller paintings, some miscellaneous tools and traveling gear tucked into the leftover spaces. On my drive west, I stopped at my parents’ house in Montana and stayed overnight to pick-up Hammer, a four-foot square painting which we also planned to hang if the space could accommodate it.

After I painted it in college and before I moved from Montana a few years later, I stored It in my parents’ basement along with other artwork and boxes of stuff. During art school, Hammer always sat off to the side somewhere. It always seemed to be a bit of an outlier for some reason. Not that my other work was cohesive, but this one seemed even more different. I can’t explain why. It just felt different. I was attached to it though so whatever it was, I knew it was something I needed to pay attention to.

After my initial show, the gallery stored my work for six months and included a piece or two in subsequent group shows that they mounted. During one of the shows, Hammer was purchased by a man named John. I never met him, and I wasn’t involved in the transaction in any way, but I did cash his check, so I know that it happened. I got his contact information from my freinds, the gallery owners, and eventually wrote to him. He lived in Portland. I thanked him and let him know how happy I was that he purchased it and gave it new life. I didn’t receive a response, so I still don’t really know its fate, or John’s status, but I hope they’re fine.

Songs :: Moods for Moderns by Elvis Costello, Once Upon a Time In the West by Dire Straits, and Two Soldiers by David Byrne

© C. Davidson

Everything

Pablo :: Image – Time Life Pictures-Getty Images

Above Montana Avenue

Pablo draws a bull in mid-air with a flashlight like he’s a matador. I only knew a little about him and his work as a painter and a sculptor before I went to college. I was aware of only his most famous pieces, like Guernica and The Old Guitarist — paintings everyone was familiar with. Then I took art history courses which provided context and dug much deeper and around that same time I came across this photo.

When I saw it my view of him changed and my view of art changed even more. That discovery, along with other stuff I was exposed to, studying, trying, and connecting to pushed me to trust my own instincts in my work. I was painting, photographing, drawing, dabbleing in video and performance art with friends, and was introduced to modern and postmodern typography and graphic design. Everything seemed to be blown wide open and happening at once.

Then one night, I was sitting on the back doorstep of my friend’s house on Montana Avenue smoking cigarettes. It was clear, moonless, and music filled the house for hours and drifted into the air outside where I was fueled by mushrooms and beer. Everything was tingling, electric, connected, and I was smiling and felt part of it. I could hear night critters foraging through the leaves and nearby winter hedge. Frequent falling stars and slow-moving satellites passed overhead. All the signals and all of the positive voices began to merge. Everything was vibrating and now even magic was a factor.

For Pablo

Songs :: Good Times Roll by The Cars, Wild West End by Dire Straits, Peace of Mind and Ride My Llama by Neil Young, and Have You Seen the Stars Tonite by Jefferson Starship and Paul Kanter

© C. Davidson

"That Dog Floats" :: [Supplemental]

Chaz Scouting Near the Mississippi River

Full Blast Near Rice Creek

Airborne Outside Our Honeycomb Hideout

© C. Davidson

Pursuit of Happiness :: [Supplemental]

Songs :: Indian Summer by Poco, Fight the Power by Public Enemy, and Southern Cross by The Ozark Mountain Daredevils

© C. Davidson

I Almost Had a Nervous Breakdown

Conk Shell

Some of the ‘Appropriate’ Gouache Containers from 1983

When I was in grad school, most of my time was consumed with required courses, thesis work, occasional grocery shopping at Star Market, laundry on Capitol Hill and urban riding adventures when I could. The undergraduate program was extensive, not only because of the variety and depth of the curriculum, but also because of the variety of students and professors. I was lucky to be around it. For all of those reasons, it was a great opportunity to take a class when I could fit it in. One that I did fit in was a winter session color class my first year. Winter session is a five week accelerated semester between fall and spring semesters.

Our very first assignment was to create the color wheel composed of primary and secondary colors. The next couple of assignments isolated specific colors, like compliments, and presented them as pairings to demonstrate various color relationships like simultaneous contrast. The next series explored value through black and white comparisons. For our final project, we picked an object to translate in color and in black and white. This assignment didn’t require painting on paper, then cutting the swatches out, assembling them and dry mounting them like all of the the others did, this assignment required us to paint directly onto the surface.

I picked a conk shell. My professor Aki asked me if I was sure I wanted to work with this object. She may have even raised an eyebrow. I assured her it would be fine. It was to pretty to pass up. I broke it down into approximately 22 colors for the color version and another 20 or so for the black and white version. If I hadn’t been impatient, it probably could have been used far more. Have you ever really looked at the inside of a conk shell like this one before? There are very few distinct color breaks. It’s just a smear of colors from one to another. I started by creating line drawings of the shell within a 10 x 10 square format in pencil and outlining general areas. Once I had the composition determined, I began to mix paint.

I used small aluminum pans about the size and depth of a hockey puck to hold the colors. They seemed perfect. After I finished mixing, I covered them in cellophane. I don’t remember exactly what happened immediately after that, why I left, or where I went, but I didn’t get back to the studio for a few days. When I returned, I peeled off the cellophane and discovered that most of them were dry, almost dry, and mostly unusable. I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown. I’d have to start completely over with the exception of just a few that survived. When I spoke with Aki to let her know what had happened and that I was way behind schedule now, she listened, nodded and simply let me know that a different type of container was probably a better way to go; like the ones above that she suggested from the beginning. So I bought them and started over. I remixed all of the colors and all of the gray values. The days flew by and I eventually just ran out of time. I didn’t finish either piece completely and she had to evaluate them on what I had. It was a disaster. Thirty-five years later I still have ‘school dreams’ about that class during periods of stress and self doubt, reliving the horror among my tediously prepared, dry, cracked gouache pucks.

Dedicated to Aki Nurosi

© C. Davidson

Stretchers or Strainers

About ten years ago a friend told me during a phone conversation that I was using the term ‘stretcher’ incorrectly. We were talking about painting and I mentioned I was excited because I had four newly built stretchers — a stretcher being the wooden frame that canvas, or linen, or whatever, is stretched over. He said, “the proper term for what you built is a ‘strainer’. Technically stretchers have expandable corner joints and strainers corners are fixed.” Adjustable corners allow for the expansion and contraction of the canvas and the wood in humid, or less humid, environments. Sometimes hardware is built into each corner of the frame and at other times thin wood shims are inserted into the mitered corner joints to expand the frame. Regardless of the technique, they’re like unicorns because I’ve had a number of painting professors in my life and none of them ever used the word strainer. They all called them stretchers, even if what we built were technically strainers. I googled the term recently too and read a number of different articles about them — it all seemed a little hazy to me. Plus the word strainer is confusing anyway—strain what? So the take away for me is that even though there’s a difference, most people say stretchers, including most painters when referring to both types of frames. However, I did see an actual ‘stretcher’ in an art supply store once, on display like it was a trophy, or a rare artifact from Italy, mounted on a stick and basking in its own technical glory. I’ve never seen a painting in the real world that used expandable corner joints, in museum storage or a gallery, or even in any documentaries about painters.

Maybe if you’re a painter in a tropical climate like Cambodia during the rainy season and then have to ship your paintings to the high dry desert for an exhibition, you might detect a change in the surface tension of the canvas—maybe then a stretcher is a good idea. Maybe if you’re commissioned to make a painting of a significant historical event for the Smithsonian, like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and the painting is immense and it needs to last forever—maybe then a stretcher is required. Maybe if you airbrush highly detailed western landscape imagery on linen and also forge your own hardware from scratch in your garage because the novelty is the most important thing to you—maybe then a stretcher seems necessary. Maybe if you’re a genius like Gerhard Richter, Susan Rothenberg, Georgia O’Keefe, Julian Schnabel, Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, or a myriad of other amazing painters and you have assistants to build things, and your paintings are purchased by collectors for hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions, then maybe you use actual ‘stretchers’. That isn’t most painters though; it’s certainly not me. Stretchers with expandable joints are a technical fetish. I’m not that interested in how you hand forged the expansion hardware for your stretcher, or that you milled expandable dovetailed miter joints. That’s cool and everything; I don’t know how to hand forge anything and I’m far to impatient to mill dovetail joints. I’m more interested in the other side; the painted side.

So until the day that a museum curator, or an expert conservator, pulls me aside and tells me otherwise, every frame is a stretcher, even if the corners are overbuilt, overscrewed, overnailed and slathered with super glue.

© C. Davidson

Prairie Forward

Folded Canvas

Near Augusta, Montana : : 2017

Sage – Badlands, South Dakota

I have a neatly folded pile of heavy cotton canvas and imagine unfolding it and attaching it to a wall. I won’t need to build a frame because I’ll gesso it on the wall, paint it on the wall, and display it in the same way. I’ll need to re-arrange my current studio space to accommodate it, or have to rent the corner of a warehouse somewhere else. Once it’s unfolded, it’ll be close to nine feet by eighteen feet. I purchased the bulk canvas years ago and used the other half to assemble four large stretched canvases. I have a lot left and that’s what I’ll use to paint something big. I imagine it’ll incorporate some big view in Montana, the Dakota Badlands, maybe Minnesota, or another enormous horizon from my youth—one that’s filled with sagebrush, grazing cattle, or wheat. It’s impossible to predict what a painting will become, but I like thinking about it.

I imagine a space that I can walk into—where I can get lost, my orientation completely in question because I can’t locate myself in space. It might shift what other people think they’re seeing too. The space could feel like a moment on countless road trips I’ve taken during the day and at night; in the dust of August or crisp nights of winter. At some point on every trip, I pull the vehicle over to the side of the road, or into an adjacent field and stay for awhile. If it’s dark, I stare into the sky stars. Sometimes during the day, I’ll open the tailgate and sit with my lunch, or dinner. I might even have food left that my wife prepared, and if I’m prepared, a thermos of coffee. If I’m in the middle of nowhere, there might be crickets, grasshoppers and meadowlarks surrounding me. It’s like I’m swimming in it. If I’m lucky, once in awhile the air will be still and heavy with sage or sweet grass, and will just drift there.

Songs :: Break My Heart Sweetly by John Moreland, and Plains (Eastern Montana Blues) by George Winston

© C. Davidson

Grinding

Occasionally somebody would blurt out, “I need to go grind my stone.” We told you the lithography class was going to be a pain in the ass.” Whenever I walked through the lithography lab, I’d look over at the presses and work tables, and usually see someone scowling while they slowly ground their stone. Eventually though, I’d see a beautiful print someone completed weeks later, and if I was lucky, I’d see them peel the paper from their stone. To top it off, they’d get to reprint it and reprint it again.

My friend E. made lithographic prints. He was a print maker and a ceramicist. Sometimes his prints defied the hard stone thy came from because his images were soft.My friend D. was mostly an intaglio print maker. He used found photographic material and created black and white photo-montages which he then exposed to light sensitive film, and then everything was exposed onto photo-sensitive aluminum plate and etched in an acid bath. He also drew directly onto his metal plate to scratch-out, or add details as needed. Eventually, he used the plate to make prints onto thick luscious paper. He had a background in painting and his prints reflected that. They were beautiful and dense. Sometimes they hinted at politics, other times they were bleak domestic images filled with melancholy. You’d often find him sitting on a stool at one of the long tables in the central print lab workspace. He was usually humped over his plate, preparing it, or manipulating the kodalith films he used to expose his plates in the darkroom. His ear buds were usually in and likely listening to Lou Reed, Roxy Music or Bowie. He’d look up and give me a friendly nod if I was just passing through, or if he sensed I wanted to talk, he’d remove his buds and encourage me to sit.

One particular evening I was up in the painting studio on the second floor and had it to myself. During the weeknights you’d often share the space with a couple of other folks, but after midnight, or on a Friday and Saturday night, you could count on being alone. Sometimes I’d be in the painting studio, or the photo lab, a friend would be in the printmaking studio, another might be in the sculpture studio and if it was really hopping, there might be a few folks in the ceramics studio. It felt like we owned the art building. The way art students should feel.

I was sitting alone staring at a big, white canvas. I had just finished applying the last coat of gesso an hour earlier, and was waiting for it to dry. D. walked in and greeted me. He went out of his way, up to the second floor, to check-in with me for the night. It was a little unusual for him to stop up. The printmaking studio and small photo lab where he spent most of his time were on the first floor, which is where he was headed. After smoking on the roof outside the studio windows, we came back in and sat and talked for awhile. While we sat there, he scanned a few of my paintings that were around and then settled on the large blank canvas I was about to work on. “I don’t know how you do it.” “Do what?” I said. “How you’re able to stare at that white surface and just start painting without a specific plan”. I asked him why. “Because I’m uncomfortable with the whole immediacy of it, that’s why I make prints. I have a plan and the process takes quite awhile before the image is printable so I can just ease into it.” I understood what he was saying and told him that I’m way too impatient. I’m most comfortable with something I can immediately respond to. That’s why I use house paint along with traditional oil paints. House paint allowed me to obliterate areas of paintings I didn’t like on the cheap. His way of working was far more methodical. That conversation was huge for me. I’d never heard anyone else reveal themselves about making art in that way, about our common fear and about how for both of us, the emotional part of the process had the biggest impact on what we made and how we made it.

Dedicated to E. S. and D. J.

Songs :: Bottoming Out by Lou Reed, Without You by David Bowie, and the entire Comes a Time and Rust Never Sleeps albums

© C. Davidson

Four Little Generosities

Wanderlust-1982

All of The Above-Open Studio Crawl

Until I launched this site, most of my finished work was rarely seen by someone other than myself. Occasionally a piece might be in an exhibition, or exist online, but that's the exception. So unless people see my work during an annual studio crawl, it's mostly unseen so I don't really have a sense of how people see it. Once in a while though, I experience someone's response directly.

One—During my first year of undergraduate school I painted a lot at home outside of my regular coursework, because focused studio courses weren’t offered until sophomore year. I entered one of those paintings the following spring to an Art in the Park juried exhibition in my hometown. It was a mixed-media piece on paper. I don't recall if I saw the show, or attended any events connected to it, but after it was over my parents collected the piece for me. Eventually, my mom called to say that a neighbor who lived down the block from them had seen it in the exhibition and asked if it was for sale. She said that she stood looking at it for a long time and wanted to have it in her house. I’d never heard a response like that about my work, especially from someone I didn’t know. My mom told her she’d ask me. When we spoke about it, I got the feeling that my folks liked it and wanted it so it’s been hanging on that living room wall ever since. For a few years afterwards, when I was stayed at my parents house, sometimes I’d see that neighbor drive down the street and we’d wave to each other.

Two—A female tenant who lived in the same duplex as my brother and sister-in-law above Bernices’ Bakery, walked into their apartment and saw the painting I’d given to them called Wanderlust. At some point during her visit, she said, "I want to make love to that painting." It must have been shocking. I was flattered. No one had ever said something that provocative about something I've made. It woild have been exciting to see her make love to my painting, but how would that even work? I have no idea and she obviously liked it. Her reaction is as good as it gets.

Three—During an ‘open studio crawl’, I heard someone enter my space during a relatively quiet time on a Saturday afternoon. I was in the back working so I looked around the corner to greet whoever it was. A woman was standing alone in front of one of my paintings called Full of Birds. I didn’t say anything and after a bit she quietly left. Awhile later, I heard someone walk in and found the same woman standing in front of it again. This time she stayed longer, so I finally approached her, introduced myself and asked her if she had any questions. Her eyes were full of tears and she hesitated to talk at first. I asked if she was alright, if she needed anything, and told me she was fine. Her son had been very sick and this painting brought it all up and soothed her at the same time. We stood together for a bit in silence, we thanked each other, and she walked down the hall.

Four—A young couple was looking at my work during a different ‘open studio crawl’ and spent most of their time in front of my ink drawings. They’re 11” x 8.5” and float within 20” x 16” frames. I noticed them and asked if they had any questions and they asked me how I made the photographs. They said they enjoyed looking at photographs and taking pictures themselves. They couldn't figure out what kind of prints they were, what kind of paper I used, and how they were made. I wasn’t following what they were saying because they aren't photographs, and then I realized that they thought my drawings were photographs. "Oh, these are ink drawings—ball point pen drawings" I said. Then they seemed confused, so I pointed to all of the used Bic pens that I had on display. This random encounter led to a long conversation about perception and art.

Songs :: I Will Follow and October by U2, How Soon is Now by The Smiths and Tales of Kilimanjaro by Santana

© C. Davidson

My Head Almost Exploded at the Van Gogh Museum

Wheat Field With Crows – 1890 – Oil on Canvas – 50.5 x 103cm – :: Image – Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Canal

Cheese Shop

Van Gogh Museum Lobby

Vincent Van Gogh created most of his work over a ten-year period — all of those amazing pieces, including his stylistic transitions, within a single decade. Not to mention that a huge hunk of his most famous works were created within his last year, like Starry Night. I don’t remember those facts from my art history classes in college, but I read it on a gallery didactic panel and in a gift shop book. I’ve always been a fan of his. My parents bought me a book of his work either for Christmas, or my birthday, when I was in seventh grade. I don’t remember if they did because I’d mentioned him, or if they wanted to introduce me to his work. Either way, the book was inspirational and shocking, not because it mentioned the story of his bandaged ear, or because of his emotional struggles, but because he painted wheat and wheat fields, and wrote about wheat fields, and I understood wheat fields.

Almost forty-five years later just a week before Christmas, my wife and I left for the Van Gogh Museum from our rented apartment in Amsterdam. It was a cool, gray, drizzling day. We walked next to and over the canals which reminded me of the movie Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. We saw dreamy Dutch architecture, thoughtful design, bread and cheese bathed in the honey light of deli storefronts, and bicyclists were everywhere. I’d imagined visiting Amsterdam and the Van Gogh Museum for a long time, but I didn’t imagine that it would feel this good.

It was off-season and the museum was still busy. Sometimes we’d need to take our turn to stand in front of certain works, like the The Potato Eaters, Sunflowers, or Wheat Field With Crows. It’s hard to remember the full experience because I was overwhelmed. There’s a lot to absorb and process in the museum, including the texture of his paint, and which brush strokes are underneath and which are on top.

Seeing his work in person, along with the other Impressionists whose paintings, drawings, and stories are also exhibited, placed all of it in a bigger context. My art history knowledge is average at best. We wandered through the museum for hours before finally needing to leave and find a place to eat lunch, grab our luggage, take a train to the airport, and fly to Italy where we were meeting our daughter. In one of the final galleries, I came across a few of his paintings that looked to be part of a series. All of them were landscapes and focused on wheat fields. I alternated between sitting on a gallery bench in front of them, and standing as close as I could to inspect their surfaces before a guard would appear. I remembered I had an unfinished painting sitting on my easel about the view of a wheat field through moving curtains in a window. I got goosebumps and felt even more connected as I saw my wife walking by Sunflowers that hung on a deep blue wall in slow motion.

For Jeenee and Seeley

Songs :: Amsterdam by Mary Gauthier, Solo by Hanah,

© C. Davidson

The Same Hat

James Lloyd Huffman :: 1960’s

My grandfather plowing the fields of the Huffman homestead near Highwood, Montana

I’ve been working on a painting for over four years. Not daily, or even monthly, instead, I go through concentrated periods when I do and then I don’t. I usually have other paintings in progress too, many I’ve finished and even a few have been exhibited during this time, but this one sits on a couple of five gallon buckets and leans against the wall. I try to ignore it, but it's five feet square so it's difficult to overlook. I currently call it Hat, Boat, Plow, because that’s what the images seem to be about, but usually it’s just the The Heaviest Painting I've Ever Done. It has so many layers that someday I’ll probably need to remove the canvas from the frame in order to transport it more easily. During these years, it’s been many different things with different intentions, and each time most of it gets painted out to white. I can’t ever figure out what it’s supposed to be and I’m never happy with what it is. Sometimes it’s an albatross. Sometimes it’s a source of anxiety. Sometimes it feels like an opportunity. Whatever my emotional response, I'm still undecided.

Typically when I sit and stand in front of it, looking at it, over-analyzing it, bombarded by all of the chatter, I try not to think and just paint but it mostly turns out to be a dead end. Thinking and painting never mix and for some reason I can’t stop thinking. Then one night I had an epiphany. Maybe I wasn't supposed to figure it out and finish it. Maybe it’s supposed to be an ongoing experiment where I can just try things without expectations. I'm a little more comfortable with that idea lately, just keeping on with it and not sabotaging it.

Last fall in the early morning hours, I was cleaning up when I glanced at the painting and out of the corner of my eye noticed the wrapped package of old artwork nearby leaning against my flat files. I had brought the work back the previous summer from Montana. It contained a few projects I did in high school during 1976, 1977 or 1978. One had been hanging on my old bedroom wall and a few others were stored in my dad's studio. I'm pretty sure these are the very last artworks left at my childhood home, except for the few that my sister owns. After I saw the package, I unwrapped it and pulled everything out. I leaned one of the pieces up against the canvas and sat in front of it. It's a black ink drawing on a piece of 36" x 30" white illustration board. There’s a montage of a wheat field, a fence line, a windmill, my grandfather on his horse drawn plow and a large head and shoulders portrait of him wearing his gray, felt hat. The portrait was copied from a classic photograph someone took of him during the late sixties. The drawing was completed for a class assignment about storytelling. It was an homage to him with all of the images blending into one another like a kind of retro movie-poster. Then I looked at my unfinished painting which is big enough to fill your field of vision when you're close enough, and realized it's the hat — it's the same hat! It felt like the forty-year-old drawing could have been a study for the painting — both about farming and Montana. At that moment everything seemed to merge and make sense, reminding me once again I don’t need to think.

For the Huffmans

© C. Davidson

Shotgun

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Riding Shotgun :: 2011

I was driving east through North Dakota the day after Christmas. It was dark, cold, the road was snow packed and in a blizzard when my friend and ex-sister-in-law called. I answered, said hello and once she said “Hi!”, I asked if she would hold on for just a minute. I muted my phone, the hairs went up on the back of my neck, and my eyes filled with tears. I couldn't believe it was her of all people calling me at that moment. I got back on and she asked me how I was, where I was and said that she'd been wanting to talk with me since my mother’s funeral almost two months earlier. Her call felt like divine intervention. We caught up with each others activities and then she simply, and warmly listened to my grief.

I’d spent a few days in Montana during the Christmas holiday with some members of my family, while my wife and daughter were in Florida to be with her family. I drove to Missoula purposely avoiding my hometown, specifically my mom and dad's house. It would feel uncomfortable and still, like a funeral home filled with types of flowers my mom wouldn't have liked. Like when certain music was chosen for her service that had no real connection to her. The music was more about the people who chose it than it being for my mom, like the Scottish dirge. She wasn't Scottish, or the Springsteen song I asked to be included. i don’t remember her once saying she was a fan of the Boss. It’s a great song, but that was about me, not her. The house might feel like those parlors filled with deep sadness, so I drove to Missoula where some of my siblings either lived or were visiting. We went out to dinner one night and I visited with some nephews and nieces the following day before heading home.

I looked forward to the return trip too because highway driving is always therapy—my shoulders relax and I feel lighter. Seeing family was good, but the drive was the main reason I went—it’s the mulling, the thinking, the re-thinking, the re-mulling, the crumbling, the talking out loud, the looking, and the picture taking that heals. Maybe a little like the Cat Stevens song On the Road to Find Out. After my sister-in-law and I said goodbye, I drove out of the lead edge of the storm where the interstate was dry, and I took the photograph Riding Shotgun with my mom sitting next to me.

For Mom and Janet

Songs :: On the Road to Find Out by Cat Stevens, Joanne by Lady Gaga and Dear Mama by 2Pac

© C. Davidson

Interpreting Wink

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Wink :: 1980-1981

When I think back, I realize that many of my paintings from college were figurative — as in the human figure. I didn't think of myself as a figurative painter then, or do I now, but there were often abstract figures in my work and sometimes they were the focus of the painting. I'm not particularly good at drawing the figure and rarely have that in mind. I did participate in a life drawing class a couple of years ago though — once a week in the evening for about eight weeks, with maybe 10-15 other folk. They took donations at the door to pay the facilitator and the model. I drew men and women on large pads of newsprint with charcoal, graphite and chalk. During the course of the two-hour session we'd get to draw ten to twelve poses, with a range of 1 to 30 minutes. Over the course of the session, I came out with a couple of drawings that were OK and the rest were bad.

Whenever I've played Pictionary over the years and was required to draw a figure, human or animal, they were chaotic scribbles that took me forever. My teammates usually just stared at the drawing and then at me in disbelief. "I'd need to be a clairvoyant to guess what you're drawing." I was better at drawing things like wind. The figures my father drew were crisp and clear. He always captured the action quickly and precisely. "It's a person raking the yard, um… it's a person watering the lawn!" “Yes!”

Wink was a painting I did in undergraduate school. Somehow it turned into a head-and-shoulders thing. It wasn't a very good painting, but I treated the figure in a way I never had before, so I'd always held on to it for posterity. I shipped it home from my parents' basement in Montana years ago. It’d been in storage for at least twenty-five years. Once it arrived here, I unpacked it and leaned it against a wall in our living room. It remained there for a couple of weeks before my wife said anything. Eventually she asked me what the painting was about. I was surprised by her question. I wasn't surprised because she asked a question, but because of the question she asked. I assumed the image was so obvious to everyone that it would be hard to interpret it any other way. In fact that was the primary reason I disliked it. It felt limiting. When I told her what it was she said she still didn't really see it. Maybe. Kinda? I was relieved. It kind of changed everything. It reminded me to relax about what I think I'm painting because I often don’t know and I can't usually control what it becomes anyway. Painting is the point.

Songs :: Moods for Moderns by Elvis Costello, Runaway and Home by Bonnie Raitt

© C. Davidson

Hal

Someone’s Always Leaving :: 1982-1983

Hal was one of my painting professors in undergraduate school. He was born In New York and arrived in Montana from the Bay Area where he grew up. He was handsome, tan, friendly and soft-spoken. I think he had been a surfer, too. His large paintings and drawings were aggressive and full of action. They were bright, complex, crowded and spacial. They were loaded and appeared completely abstract at first glance, but the longer and deeper you looked, the more figurative they became. He casually told me once that "there's no difference between abstraction and representation. It's only a matter of how the elements are assembled and how they relate to each other that shifts a piece one way or the other."

One Friday afternoon during Spring quarter, I met with him in the empty painting studio where I had set up a few canvasses. I sat on the base of a wooden easel leg and he sat next to me in a hard-backed chair. I don't remember exactly how long we sat there before either of us said anything, but It felt like a long time. I started to feel a little nervous and felt pretty certain that he hated them and was just searching for a gentle way to tell me. He finally said, "how's your love life?" I was surprised, even a little shocked, and eventually responded with "what love life?" "That makes sense," he said. I felt totally exposed and confused. They weren't figurative, or sexual, and didn't feel erotic to me in any way. None of that was what I’d been thinking about while I worked on them, but once he said it, I tried to look through that lens. It wasn't about literal figures, or symbols — it was about what he felt in front of it. That’s what painting was about for me then and now, and I still have to remind myself of that today. Nothing more was said about my lack of a love life and so we continued to talk as if nothing had shifted.

For Hal

© C. Davidson