| Brief History: |
(1920 - 1985)
Gene Davis, a painter associated with the Washington Color Painters, is a self-taught artist
whose early work represents several phases of experimentation, including abstract
expressionism, neodada and proto-pop. Davis was born in Washington, D.C. in 1920. He
spent most of his adult life in that city: until the late 1950's Davis was a journalist, serving
as a White House correspondent and a sportswriter. His involvement with art began early
in the 1950s when he visited the Washington Workshop and worked with Jacob Kainen,
whom he regards as his guide and mentor.
Davis is perhaps best known for his edge-to-edge paintings of vertical stripes, which he first
began to produce in 1958. That first stripe painting, considered at the time a maverick work,
was approximately 12 by 8 inches, with straight yellow, pink and violet stripes, of uneven
width, but alternating with regularity. Davis considers the vertical stripe as a vehicle for
color that follows no preexisting chromatic scale. By varying the hue and intensity of the
stripes, Davis creates a sense of a figure on a ground. Of the stripes, he has written, "There
is no simpler way to divide a canvas than with straight lines at equal intervals. This enables
the viewer to forget the structure and see the color itself." |
