I drove east in 1962, having been invited to the Yale-Norfolk School of Music and Art as a grantee. The crits I got there were incomprehensible. After a while I figured out they were analyzing my paintings in terms of Cubism, and Cubism was something I was not looking for. I didn't want to look at the world and then abstract it. I said I wanted to approach it more directly, just make abstract paintings – which resulted in a couple of heated discussions. Phillip Guston came up to Norfolk and sat on the lawn and talked about himself for five hours. He said, "You have to paint flat footed, not looking at your painting while you're painting it." Good advice indeed!
While I was back east I expected to be able to view the works of Pollock, Still, De Kooning, Rothko, et al. But what I did find in the museums and New York galleries were some gray boxes and some blown-up versions of panels from comic books. I was taken aback because these were not the serious, even elitist pictures I had been seeking to emulate and learn how to make. They amused me, particularly a Lichtenstein, where the viewer is looking through a keyhole at a couple, with the bubble caption: "I just looked, Brad, and there's nobody out there." It was reassuring to find out that I was the "nobody," and interesting to find in these formative years that art had become entertainment rather than a means of expression. It was liberating to discover that art didn't have to express anything or mean anything. That it didn't matter what a painting looked like.
Struggling to gain a finger hold in the formidable tradition of abstract painting, I attempted synthesis between "the Minimal Object," Pop and Op fashion, and traditional, emotion-driven expressionist painting. For instance, even though I, like DuChamp, reintroduced perspective illusion – and the illusions of objects – into my painting, the objects themselves remained abstract and non-referential, although that's usually up to the surrealist viewer. This struggle between object and the pictorial remains central to my work after forty years. I did not bring ironic non-art objects or concepts into the context of art at a time when trendy non-art was being redefined as "art." It's my belief that art as art has become devalued.
It was never my intention to deconstruct art as I found it. I strove to expand the boundaries of painting, not the boundaries of what was then becoming art: gray or glass boxes, conceptual art, installation art, performance art, minimalist art, or political art. My choice was to do the opposite, yet remain on the playing field of twentieth-century abstract painting. In my case, doing the opposite did not mean doing something completely different; I embraced the traditions of twentieth-century abstract painting. In fact, I have always remained in the Clement Greenberg "dialogue of post-painterly abstraction," although in the studio – in the moment – I haven't always followed his theoretical suggestions. Also, I can't say that I haven't been influenced by minimalism; but the emptiness of classical minimalism was not enough. I had to include beauty. By straddling the fence (not without risk), I was successful in forging a style I could call my own.
For the first of many times, I had painted myself into a corner. I was left with making an object: a container for the activity and intensity of the stoop labor. The deal is, this activity is not fun, not romantic, not expressive – it is a mindless activity that requires an empty mind, beginner's mind in the Buddhist sense. The hard work of making an object without thought or effort. "Having fun" and "feeling good," I have found out, are two different things. As it works out, the art world – the length and breadth of it – is an artist, in the studio, doing stoop labor, making things – making objects. I am envious of the craftsman, because he at least makes things that are useful.
My paintings present no narrative. What you see is not what you get. They are self-didactic, teaching me about form, and color, and perception itself. They are concave and convex, to serve either sex. But then, I am not really trying to be of service to the "art world." The paintings are often the opposite of what they seem. People think they're "happy," because I use bright colors. Conversely, some think the paintings are aloof and cerebral; rather, they are defensive, protecting my fragility. I don't know what they mean; I just know how to make them. A painting's just gotta look better than the wallpaper.
I'm hardly ever confronted with the blank canvas syndrome. It starts prior to that – I have to reinvent the concept of a blank canvas. I know a painting is finished, at least for me, when I get bored with it. Or, if it's any good, it pushes me outside of it, and I just become another viewer.
Between 1964 and 1988 I painted about a thousand paintings, bouncing between painterliness and hard-edge, or combinations. A "Pollock in a box" comes to mind. I don't always equate expressionism with gooey paint on canvas. Apollonian can be just as "expressive" as Dionysian; it's a matter of what is being expressed.
In 1965, I moved to LA. I showed a lot, sold a lot, built a big studio in Malibu, and consumed a lot. I had a very successful career. By the late 80s, I'd had enough. I'd accomplished what I'd been sent back from the future to do. (Emphatically, I think I was reincarnated. I'm from the future.) Fifty-five one-man shows had left me with the taste of ashes.
In 1990 I left the freeways of LA behind, and disengaged for the most part. I moved to New Mexico, where I built a group of domed polygonal buildings I designed with architect Dennis Holloway, based on the Navajo hogan dwelling.
I stopped painting for a while because I couldn't see any reason to make objects in the context of the 1980s, for the sake of "show biz." The self-indulgent self-promotional 80s: I didn't fit into that. So I disengaged for 10 years. This exhibition at the Butler Institute of American Art is my first major exhibition in 10 years – with the exception of a small show of the 1996 Wax Series in January 1998 at a gallery in Taos, New Mexico. I did attempt to do some sculpture, enough to know I am not very good at it.
Now, I can reflect that my aspiration was to be an abstract expressionist, to walk in the footsteps of Still and Pollock but, characteristically, I was unsuited to do so. I can only construct things, something like the old European constructivists. Yet, like Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock, I am an American Westerner, and an unsophisticated one at that, though I've learned a lot in my more than 40 years of painting. I am not a "cultured" man. I can only make objects, but "paintings as objects" was not enough, either. I was able to make it a bit more complicated by attempting to make pictures of illusions of objects. One thing I can say is that the subject of my paintings is not the unconscious.
A lot of people think I make my paintings – these objects – for them. They're wrong about that. The activity is selfish. On bad days, I feel that it's just a vehicle to confirm that I will be misunderstood once again.
Ultimately, my success was really my personal failure, my original goal being to be a starving artist. Dealing with success has been so much harder than making paintings. If I've made any contribution at all, it is that counter to the glacial movement of serious twentieth century painting since Cézanne towards flatness, I reintroduced the theorems of three-dimensional Renaissance mathematical perspective into my made objects – my constructions. This is my legacy, my contribution to the art history books. With this, I stumbled into a style of painting that can excavate walls, shift the point of view of a Looker in a post-Einsteinian relativity within the context of a terrifying, existential, overpopulated nuclear world, where the observed is – only perhaps – relative to the Looker.
Even though paintings are not intrinsically useful, it was my thought that my paintings never wore out, no matter how much people looked at them, nor how many people looked at them. But I found out that when the paintings are moved or shipped, they are physically easily damaged. Of course that doesn't happen out of maliciousness, but from lack of common sense. People will carefully put a plate in the cupboard, but will hang a big fragile painting with a little picture hook – and it falls off the wall!
People don't understand that as an artist, I some-times feel like the world wants to hang me on the wall by the scruff of my neck. I am not my paintings. (Sometimes I catch myself talking about them in the third person.) People often don't understand that an artist is someone who has to fill out a credit card application, who has to put the word "artist" in the space after "occupation."
I think "Artist" has become a devalued word. Somebody told me once that the Greeks didn't even have a word for "artist." Their word was "artisan." That word fits me better, I believe, because I make things – I'm more of an object-maker than a picture-painter.
I did make a few gallery-museum sales and connections during the time I wasn't working on actual painting. Actually, I have been working all along, the whole time. The wood sculptures, the encaustics. The watercolors I painted with my son. The computer drawings – hundreds of them. I am always in the process of learning three dimensional drawing and technical modeling techniques with new computer programs. The exploration of and experimentation with new modes of visualization. And I spend a lot of time building and maintaining the web site www.abstract-art.com.
When I stopped serious painting, I didn't go dormant. There has been an alchemical process at work, a trans-formation I can't explain except to say that these new paintings are an "inside job." I am making them from a sense of personal obligation, which means a lot of things to me. On September 11, 2001, I watched the second airplane fly into the World Trade Center on television. After I cried, lit candles, and hung up my American flag on the front door of my kitchen hogan, a grave sense of my own mortality struck me. A week later, I drove to Albuquerque and bought seven hundred dollars worth of materials, something I haven't done for a very long time. I know that for me, the only way to make a difference – which really will make no difference whatsoever – is to go into the studio for the rest of my life, and vent my emotional responses to the events that have changed all our lives forever. The new paintings are neither expressions nor representations of that event. My generalship in the world against existential terror-at-large is to just do the work in my studio.
I am not a connoisseur. I have not intentionally been to a museum in 15 years. I have no gallery affiliations. I have no subscriptions to art magazines. I read paperback novels and military history. I socialize little, and I watch a lot of TV. I abhor travel.
As I near my 65th birthday, I have come to know that the whole of the art world and of art history itself, is contained in the isolation of this artisan, making an object, a picture, in the dark of the night.
I'm just trying to figure out how to pay the $186 light bill.
— Ronald Davis
February 2002, Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico