The Landscape of Painting

My Life as an Artist | Part Two

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.

Tags: landscape painting

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