Alchemist of Imagination
The Art and Legacy of Lee Baxter Davis
- Charissa N. Terranova -
In a vignette on Leonardo da Vinci, the sixteenth-century biographer Giorgio Vasari described the artist as chasing after his own imagination. In the modern minds eye, da Vinci was a locomotive force of creative genius behind which tugged, scooted and scurried the artists skillful hands. For Vasari, a painter and architect in his own right (as well as mythologist to art historians of today), Leonardos ongoing pursuit of inventionboth fanciful and functionalexplained why the artist, in Vasaris words, started so many things without finishing them; for he was convinced that his hands, for all their skill, could never perfectly express the subtle and wonderful ideas of his imagination.1
While graphic artist and painter Lee Baxter Davis seems to complete most of what he starts, he suffers from the same scuffle and drive that beset Leonardo. Davis, too, is always in hot pursuit of his own imaginative forces, running behind the pulsion of creative form and deliverance that emerges from his own mind. Davis uses words like complexity and labyrinthine to describe these forces and the powerful symbolism that they so often produce, though the word irreducible is equally appropriate. Davis makes drawings and paintings that tend not so much to capture his imagination but render its essence as feral and irreducible, resisting capture, stasis and domestication. His is an alchemy of the imagination, and he is a modern alchemistan artist rendering ideas in forms so protean that once you think youve got them pegged, theyve moved on and become something else.
Walter Schran, Night Ideas 1, 2004
Inkjet and gouache
9 x 12 inches
Drawing under the Influence: Lee Baxter Davis & His Protgs, a recent show at The Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, portrays the manner in which Davis mode of invention and expertise is catching, like a contagion born of charisma and talent. The show marked the end of Davis thirty-year career as a drawing teacher at Texas A&M at Commerce, bringing home the fact that Davis influence on other artists has been, in fact, equal parts charismatic contagion and pedagogy.
Davis presence in the Texas hinterlands changed the lives of many. Yet, while spreading his skills, knowledge, idiosyncratic style and craft through teaching, his influence remains fundamentally close to home. Davis peculiarity as an artisthis odd, dual presence as a curmudgeon with no limits to his generosityemerges from a sense of region and place. From the woody heartland of Commerce emerges his whimsical, apocalyptic and always otherworldly imagery.
Encapsulating a sentiment of synergy is a list of former-students-cum-successful-artists: Phil Bennison, Georganne Deen, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Ric Heitzman, Greg Metz, Robyn ONeil, Gary Panter, Monica Pierce, Walter Schran, Christian Schumann and Linda Stokes. Sharing tutelage and a penchant for the figural, Davis former students also share a high level of accomplishment, many having gone on to vibrant careers ranging from comic book illustrator, set designer for Pee-Wees Playhouse and graphic novelist, to Whitney Biennial participants, curators and art professors. However, the red thread truly uniting these artists is a vocabulary of symbolic form inherited from Davis. It is an idiom of iconic referencesboth abstract and identifiablethat, while clearly marking Davis presence and influence in his students lives, is remarkably individuated in each artists work. Getting to the core of this influence, it is Davis alchemy that is so communicable and expansive among his inheritors, spreading like the branches and seedlings of a magical, broad-girth tree living quietly in an enchanted, hallucinogenic forest in rural Texas.
Davis cites Hieronymus Bosch, the Surrealists and the writings of Carl Jung as his direct influences. Such forces are immediately evident in his style and form of figuration, especially in the invention of twisted-yet-symbolic life forms such as the wolf-becoming-tree-becoming-man that sits atop a crocodile in Print Edition of 10 (1975) and the amphibious fish-cum-cat of Disembarkation (1994).
Greg Metz, Honey drippers, 2004
Charcoal
40 x 60 inches
Photo Harrison Evans
Lee Baxter Davis, Saint Obe Discovers American, 1994
Ink, watercolor, collage
21 x 29 inches
Photo Harrison Evans
Davis describes an array of less forthrightly evident influencesfrom Laurel and Hardy and the movie Bonnie and Clyde to the philosophies of Kant and the Jesuits. Having a conversation with Davis carries with it all of the gyrations of his drawings and paintings. For the shows curator Greg Metz, himself a former student of Davis, the greatest distillation of expression for the artist comes in the form of the symbols that he draws rather than the language he speaks. Davis is actually not so different from Paul Klee, who also looked to nature, natural space and the divine not only for inspiration but for raw material.2 Metzs description of Davis as an artist who works through silence is precisely on the mark, as it brings us into the realm of alchemythe medieval apothecarys practice known as a hermetic science because of its relationship to Hermes-Mercury, the god who urges silence as he guides souls through the underworld.3
Similar to all hermetic philosophers, Davis images function by way of poetics, specifically allegory and metaphor, denying any literalness that might make his symbols readily accessible in another context.4 In keeping with the dynamism of these two literary terms, there is a logic of movementboth rhetorical and dialectical in naturebehind the hermeticism of Davis and his symbols. Like the work of Bosch, Davis symbolism operates according to an ever active dialectic, the swinging and interactive poles of which are the magical and practical.5 Looking with modern eyes at Boschs paintings, such as Garden of Earthly Delights (1504), we see a world of well-nigh hypnotic fantasya space of symbolism far removed from the periodic table so familiar to modern chemists. Yet, egg-shaped vessels and tubular vials are not only references to the poetic but to the serious practices of medieval science.
In attempting to transmute and distill gold, or the philosophers stone, from various other substances, medieval alchemists practiced a brand of science more in keeping with ancient ideas than our own notions of scientific practice. As with both Greek and Roman antiquity, the world of the medieval alchemist was one in which philosophy and science, the poetic and useful, the magical and rational, were united by meaning and necessity.
With respect to magic, the first of two active and dialectical forces at hand in Davis work, refers to a litany of symbolic types. All of themGod, the realm of the spiritual and the Genesis myth, to name just threefall under the greater rubric stipulated by cosmology. The simplicity of this single wordcosmologybelies the complexity of Davis thinking. Just as transmutation was an inevitable fact of life for alchemists long ago, so too do flux and the fundamental changefulness of things occupy the mind of the artist.6 Behind the word cosmology one finds the roiling waters of Davis imaginationan imagination formed, above all, by life experience as well as an ongoing, eventlike force: religion. Yet Davis brand of religiosity, undoubtedly influenced by his Methodist-minister grandfather, is today a reflection of his own work as a deacon in the Catholic Church and is, like his alchemical imagination, irreducible.
As such, Davis cast of symbols is at times both Biblical and purely prosaic. Querying him about two large-scale watercolors in his studio, one of a rhinoceros and another of a middle-aged woman with giant anthropomorphic sunflowers looming over her, Davis replies with a question: What do you think? The infidel that I am, I reply that I have not a clue. He kindly explains that the rhinoceros represents the law and the stones and tomato beneath him represent knowledge and heart respectively. As for the other painting, he explains that the woman and aggressive sunflowers hark back to the Eden-like setting of the Genesis myth, making for a rendering as hallucinogenic as the original Christian version. While Davis references a constellation of seemingly universal and archetypal symbols in the Jungian sense, they are tinged by the arbitration of his mind. They are always shot through his subjective embodimenta corporeal existence constituted by the living, breathing and contingent struggle and contemplation of his own memories and fantasies. Included in his symbology are references to things and aphorisms that are part of our collective knowledge, as well as to images and icons less readily identifiable that emerge directly from his intimate life, both past and present.
In the watercolor and ink work Seven (1999), Davis fused the sacred and the profane, uniting the seven deadly sins with the proverb of the silk purse and sows ear. In the image, Davis rendered a large, supine sow with blood-sweating ears attached by tacks to its hindquarters. Floating above the sow are the bound, bloody feet of Christ. Beneath the sow are shiny black pearls or marbles rolling out of a pinkish silk purse. In the lower corners of the image, Davis inscribed, in a medieval looking font, the seven deadly sins: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, greed and sloth. Around the edge of the piece, small boxes containing drawings of sows-ear purses bulge with contents unknown. Instead of looking upon this painting as a union of proverbs, we should see it as a commentary on morality itselfthe cautionary note being that the seven deadly sins never appear as a codified unit in the Bible. It would seem that Davis message is one of impossibility: redemption may be desired, but it may very well be impossible to achieve, leaving us with the greatest folly ever bestowed on the reasoning human mind.
Robyn ONeil, They walk, fall, continue and die, (2004)
Pencil on paper
32 x 40 inches
More autobiographical (and thus more hermetic) are those icons and forms that reference Davis time spent as a medic in the Korean War. In some images, Davis references these experiences in mere passing such as the helicopter floating in the luminous sky in Saint Obe Discovers America (1994). In others, war becomes the stuff of portraiture, such as in Virtuous Nude (2004) and Still Life with Beaver Skull (2004). In Virtuous Nude Davis depicts himself in military regalia, gun in hand. His figure appears twice as though spliced in a mirror reflection. Davis sits in a chair right-side-up and, next to himself, upside down and encircled by a bubblelike frame. Davis suggests the inversion of self that accompanies the violence of warwars literal and figurative rending of the mortal coil. In Still Life with Beaver Skull, Davis walks a tightrope with a cat on his back, facing a woman who delicately balances her hand on his helmet. Beneath the balancing act appears a fruit basket with a skulla classic memento mori reinforcing the transience of all things.
Being touched by logic and an antiquated sensibility means that Davis work is informed by a sense of the pastthe immediate past (before political correctness) and the long-ago pasta world in which carefully honed craftsmanship was central to ones community and the world writ large.
Whether a mark of geography, emancipation or soul-searching fortitude, the absence of political correctness in Davis work produces provocative images that are occasionally disturbing in terms of subject matter and execution. These questionable images might function in different ways in other historical contexts. For example, our reaction to Davis self-portrait in military uniform with a gun in his hand may shift according to opinions on national engagement in war, whether we support it or not. In a similar vein, the watercolor and ink image Jewish Bride (1980), depicting a woman with caricatured features, could easily be construed as politically incorrect. Perhaps this is part of Davis process. Working within a rubric of symbols can easily give way to caricature and stereotype. It runs the risk of oversimplification and, worse, bigoted convention by its very nature and content. Such loaded simplification is thankfully absent, for the most part, in Davis vocabulary of icons. Perhaps this is his intention: to make images that provoke and outrage us. Whatever the case, Davis repertoire, beyond merely piquing ones interest, sends the viewer reeling into a realm of volatile questions: Who am I? What is that? What does it mean? Is that appropriate? Am I appropriate for liking it?
With an eye to the practical question of craftsmanshipthe second of the two dialectical forces behind Davis workwe are witnesses to an absolute sense of perfection and precision displayed in the artists drafting skills. Davis turns his craft into a science, rendering pictorial space with an accuracy reserved today for computer software. Yet, as with cosmology, he takes the objective science of drafting and gives it an essence that is inherently subjective and irreducibledependent upon ones own mood while watching and rendering. I would like to refer to this as Davis measure of empiricism: the manner in which he finds, at the root of the act of observing, a panoply of subjective sentiments and experiences. Empiricism is, for Davis, a process of looking at form in natural space and then rendering it pictorially thus becoming, like cosmology, a portal to the fathomless infinite. Davis describes the process of empirical engagement in terms of Kantian aesthetics; that is, according to the subject-object relationship articulated in the thinking of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Following Kant, looking and rendering involves exact science and emotional interpretation. With respect to the subject-object engagement, drawing what one sees involves the observation of real objects (the raw empirical moment), interpretation by the mind (the subjective, emotional moment) and rendering on a two-dimensional, flat plane (another secondary empirical moment). Beyond the ideas of Kant, Davis has generated his own very particular stance on pictorial space. In learning how to draw accurately, one must learn the possibilities and the rulesthe extension and limit of the two-dimensional plane. As a plane opening up onto pictorial space, what appears prima facie to be mere flatness offers limitless dimensional play.
It is this malleable yet precise scientific process of rendering, coupled with the alchemy of his imagination, that allows Davis to outline what he calls the psychodrama of the world. Describing our shared existence according to a collective psychodrama seems much more persuasive than the similar Jungian turn of phrase, collective unconscious. Jaunty yet accurate, Davis word choice illustrates his success in walking another tightrope; namely, the line between the universal and the particular. The word can stretch. It describes part of a very specific contingency yet also (perhaps sadly, perhaps not) the world at large. Giving verbal body to lifes theatrics of concocted memory, hubris and giddy anxiety, psychodrama resonates with the harried and schizophrenic modern life. The psychodrama of life rides into the pictorial space on the tip of a pen, by way of Davis nervous energynervousness that is recognizable in its humanness yet utterly singular in its wonderfully perverse embodiment as so many chiseled and whipped delineations on flat space quickly become multidimensional.
As a modern-day alchemist, Davis processes are altogether in keeping with hermetic practices. Like a hermit practicing his art in millennia past, Davis is isolated. He has chosen to separate himself from society, locating his studio, home and family life far from the hustle and bustle of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio or Austin. Davis finds peace and purity of existence in the quietude of a rural existence. Instead of reaping and sowing the land for its hearty edibles, he reaps and sows the earth for intellectual nourishment. It is a type of sustenance that could only come from the coupling of separation and deliberationfrom self-willed banishment to the silent wilds of a life found deep in the nowhere lands of Texas.
Ric Heitzman, Composition in Blue and Red, 2004
Acrylic and pencil with collage
20 x 30 inches
1 Vasari, Giorgio, Lives of the Artists Volume 1, trans. George Bull (New York: Penguin Books, 1987) 257.
2 Quotes from Paul Klee in Introduction by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Pedagogical Sketchbook (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969) 7, 12.
3 Roob, Alexander, The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy and Mysticism (London: Taschen, 1997) 13. The descriptors hermetic science and hermetic art also follow from the name of the medieval Gnostic saviour Hermes Trismegistus, an early practictioner of alchemical science. See Allison Coudert, Alchemy: The Philosophers Stone (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1980) 27.
4 Roob, 36. In an excerpt equally applicable to the work of Davis, one seventeenth-century text warns I assure you that anyone who attempts a literal understanding of the writings of the hermetic philosophers will lose himself in the twists and turns of a labyrinth from which he will never find the way out.
5 Dixon, Laurinda, Boschs Garden of Delights Triptych: Remnants of a Fossil Science, The Art Bulletin, Vol. LXIII, No. 1 (March 1981) 9697 and Dixon, Boschs St. Anthony TriptychAn Apothecarys Apotheosis, Art Journal. Vol. 44 (Summer 1984) 120.
6 Coudert, 29.