As the sets I needed to design got more sophisticated, I needed to develop new skills in order to speed up the drudgery of designing with pencil and paper, as well as to more effectively present my ideas to my clients. So the next step was to learn how to use a 3D program on the computer. I took 6 months to learn enough that I could make the switch to the computer, away from the draft board. But in reality, these programs are so deep and complex that it took me maybe four or five years to be able to show my ideas the way I saw them in my head. Do you see a theme here? I teach myself stuff. But all was not well in the world of commercials and TV in Philadelphia, at least, and in the latter part of the 90′s the set design business had faded for me, at least in terms of carrying the overhead of a shop. In 1998 I closed my company.

Instead I began to work freelance as a set designer for companies that had a shop, but no designer. It was a good situation. I bore none of the costs of running a business, but I still got to design sets.

All the while we continued to go to Maine in the summer, and and I always worked on my paintings. Throughout the 90′s I had several one-man shows of my watercolors. By then I’d been working in watercolors for going on a decade, so I decided to switch to pastels, which I’d never done before. I pretty much set watercolors aside as I taught myself how to paint in pastels. Doing pastel paintings on location was very problematic, though, so I started to do sketches and take photos of scenes that I liked, and then I’d work on the paintings over the winter months. The pastel pieces were more involved, and I enjoyed working in the studio, with more control of the weather and light, and even enjoyed painting some interior scenes, which I’d never tried before.

Eventually, through the early 2000′s I had several shows of my pastels, in Maine, Massachusetts and Delaware. Always happy to learn something new, in 2004 I decided to teach myself how to paint in oils. It took me several years of hard work to get to the point of feeling that my paintings were ready to be seen by the world. In the spring of 2007 I had a show of more than 30 landscapes in oil. This is a painting from that show:

Cliffs | 2006

While it would be great to live a life doing nothing but artwork to make a living, that only happens to very few artists. There has to be another way to make a living. As you’ve seen, I’ve done a bunch of things to make a living. I just remembered that I didn’t mention that I did several stained glass commissions after college. Maybe another time I’ll tell that story. Or the time that another stained glass artist had me pose as Jesus for one of his pieces for a church. But I digress. I still do the occasional set design – this work has virtually disappeared – but I’ve also tried to reinvent myself, this time as a website designer. As you might guess, I’m happy because I have to teach myself new stuff. Here’s the link to Avenue 3 Design, my portfolio website for web design and 3D rendering.

I guess this is where we came in. I think we can now move forward from my original posting, How I Got Here. Now that we’ve met, I plan to blather on in future posts about how I work, what I like about my work and don’t, how I’m inspired by other artists and why, and other issues that may have something to do with painting, or maybe just things that interest me. Thanks for reading.

A Tunnel of Trees | 1999 Stephen Springer Davis

When we last left our hero, I had left teaching to pursue his own artwork…I still needed to make some money, so took a regular freelance job three days a week at a magazine publisher, preparing pages for printing and did my rubber stamp pieces the other three days. My freelance job was relatively painless and didn’t exhaust me mentally, so I had the energy to do artwork in the evenings too. I had a six-month detour, though, getting a grant from the state of Delaware to teach art in prisons. Of that I’ll simply say that the most talented people I taught were also the most terrifying. When the six months was over, I had money enough to live (on peanut butter, cheese and sardines mind you) for a year, and I moved to Philadelphia.

Having the grant money in the bank allowed me the time to push towards getting a show. By 1979 I was ready for my first one-man show. Here’s a review of that very show, from an old-fangled thing called a newspaper. Hey wait, what a co-inky-dink that I should mention this now! The Station Gallery is celebrating the 30th anniversary of my show, as well as the gallery’s opening starting April 3, 2009.

I should parenthetically report that 1979 was the year that my musical partner and I gave up our dream of making it in music. Many songs written and many performances of them. Curtain calls and close calls not withstanding, it was time to move on, ending nearly 14 years of playing together.

Between 1979 and 1982 I had a bunch of shows of my rubber stamp work: New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Basel, Switzerland. The reality is, though, that even an artist who sells work fairly regularly is usually just scraping by. The cost of materials, framing and the sharing of the gallery’s commission don’t leave much. Oh, and if no one buys the artwork you get paid nothing.

Which brings me to the show of 24 of my “tile pieces” I had in 1983 in San Francisco, this was to be the final phase of my rubber stamp artwork. When the show ended, for the first time ever, nothing sold. I was shocked. That had never happened before. When the work came back, my wife, Nina, and I stared at the pieces, flabbergasted. But they’re so beautiful, we said. To the left is a piece from that show. The gallery sent me guest book, and there were entries like “too apocalyptic” or “why would the artist want to destroy something so beautiful?” I was mystified, but also devastated. I think I’ll talk more about this phase of my artwork more in future post. I began to think seriously about not continuing as an artist.

By 1983, now married and the father of a daughter, Charlotte Davis, who is a professional photographer in New York, I needed to find ways to help support the family, so I officially decided to put making artwork on hold.

Luckily, at that same time, I fell into work as a prop person for production companies making commercials in Philadelphia. For a typical commercial I’d be charged with buying or renting furniture, kitchen stuff, etc. for on location shooting. Then at the location I would have to dress the environment, and then when shooting was done, I’d have to return everything. It was a great job. I could be doing something sort of artistic, and get this – when I was done, I’d get paid. That’s quite different from being an artist, creating artwork and hoping that someday someone might buy it.

After a few years of being a prop stylist I was asked by a producer to design the set for a kitchen for a Drano commercial. That was a big change – I had never designed anything before. I had to figure out how to use drafting tools. I had to do measured drawings for construction. I had to lead the carpenters. But the project went well, and I loved the fact that I only had to have the ideas, and then tell other people to make the stuff.

Three years later I had my own set building company, Get Set, and had a staff of up to seven people working for me. Over the next ten years we provided sets for many commercials, corporate videos, and ultimately TV shows. But at the same time I was trying to develop new skills as an artist. Every summer my wife and I and our kids (Garrett Davis, who’s now all growed up too, is a freelance cinematographer in New York, born in 1987) went to visit friends in Maine who live on a lake. One year I decided to take along a watercolor kit to do paintings by the water as the kids swam around.

Over the next few years I painted one week a year. Each summer I would have to catch up to the level of skill I’d attained the summer before, but by the end of that week I would have moved forward a bit. The watercolors I painted in Maine were small, 6″ x 4″ at the largest, so that I could finish one in a sitting – that way I’d have something to show for a week of painting. By the mid-80′s I was starting to casually sell my paintings to people in Maine – not in galleries, just directly to interested people. Our friend, Sara, acted as my agent and was able to sell paintings after we headed back home.

A Sliver of Light | 2008

Above you see one of my oil paintings, painted last year. I’ll be writing this blog to talk about my artwork, and how I’ve evolved as an artist, and about the artists who’ve influenced and inspired me along the way, but first I think there should be an introduction. Unless I sent you the link, you may not know who I am or my artwork. So gather ’round children and I’ll tell you the tale of How I Got Here.

I majored in painting at Kenyon, small liberal arts college, and I was one of only six art majors. The program was kind of experimental and basically we had a lot of freedom (good) but very little instruction (bad), other than in drawing and art history. I often wish I had gone to an actual art school so I could have actually learned something about painting. It would have given me a head start. Oh well. Everything I know about painting I’ve taught myself. But I did manage in college to develop a sense of what art should be, for me at least.

The whole time I was in college I played in a band, St. John’s Wood, (very English, don’t you know) which later became an acoustic duo, Budgie (from a John Lennon story – very English, don’t you know). We were serious about trying to make it as musicians after college, and since my partner in the duo was moving to Washington DC for graduate school (everybody’s gotta have a fall-back), and I went too so that we could continue writing songs and performing in clubs. And that we did, playing here, there and everywhere, as the headliner or opening for bigger names. As it happens, we were captured on video (a pretty rare occurrence for 1971), and here’s a song from that video – I’m the dark-haired translucent one:

I needed a day job, so I decided to give commercial illustration a try, even though I had no real clue about it, other than having an admiration for illustrators like C. Dana Gibson, Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth and John Held Jr., all of whom I learned about in my art history classes. So I created a portfolio of made-up illustrations and took it around to newspapers, magazines and advertising agencies.

Here’s an illustration I did for an article on the disappearance of the family farm in The Washington Post, using a technique called scratchboard. This technique was used in the early 20th century, but had pretty much disappeared by the time I happened to read about it. The medium for scratchboard is a fairly rigid paper that has a white clay-like surface covered with black India ink. The artist uses various sharp tools to reveal the white below, kind of working the opposite of drawing with a pen. Because no one else seemed to be using scratchboard, I thought it would be a good way to differentiate myself from other illustrators in DC. Art directors appreciated the novelty, and I got a fair amount of work with this technique for a while there.

Meanwhile, my musical partner and I kept on writing songs and playing our music. Our worst night was two people in the audience. We said, “Thank you, both of you.” We kept our day jobs. Over the years the duo’s name changed: Owenroe, Aethylred, Stained Glass Jeep (proposed, but never implemented), other names I’ve forgotten, and finally, October.

Over the next three years I did a illustrations for various publications, most of them governmental. I worked exclusively in black and white, doing drawings with black ink on white paper, ink washes and scratchboard. I remember that I was asked to bid on some illustrations for a Department of Energy brochure. I was told that my price was too low, and that I should bump it up some. I did, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was wrong to do so, because as a taxpayer I actually was paying for my work, and why should this person so freely spend my money on me? I hope that brochure was not really the reason we’re all in such trouble today.

In 1973 I happened to meet a group of people who were starting an alternative high school, and I was offered a job of becoming the art department. I was pretty tired of taking my portfolio around DC, so I decided that a fun job with a regular salary and summers off would be a good change, so I took the job. The plan was to do illustrations on the side, especially in the summers.

The school had very little money for supplies. We couldn’t afford linoleum blocks for printmaking, so I decided we could carve rubber erasers with X-Acto blades (amazingly, not one kid went to the emergency room on my watch) to print on paper using standard ink pads.

As the kids did their work, I began to realize that I should create some artwork myself using hand-carved rubber stamps and drawing ink. My first attempt with rubber stamps was a valentine for my mother. It was simple, but I instantly saw the possibilities for using the stamps. I became kind of obsessed with this experimentation, and teaching and illustration work started to move closer to the back of the bus.

Meanwhile, my musical partner and I kept on writing songs and playing our music at night. We had several close calls with record companies, but we kept our day jobs. I wanted to do music and do my paintings. I left teaching after four years to allow for more time doing my artwork.