Field Notes — craig davidson

Wink :: 1980-1981 — ***Wink*** :: 1980-1981

When I think back, I realize that many of my paintings from college were figurative. I didn't think of myself as a figurative painter then, or do I now, but sometimes they were the focus of the painting. I'm not particularly good at drawing the figure. 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 10-15 other folks. 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 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 weren’t.

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. After 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. Just painting is the point.

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"I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it." Frank Gehry

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

Someone’s Always Leaving :: 1982-1983 — ***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 them. 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 we continued to talk as if nothing had shifted.

For Hal