“Could it be that beauty is born of coloured stuff spread out for the love of life?” – Katya Berger Andreadakis
With these new paintings, Mel Davis explores the polarities between the natural and the allegorical, the decorative and the expressive, the representational and the gestural. She is engaged in a conversation that exists between these states, measuring the gaps between thought and language, trying to expand on her diverse visual vocabulary.
Integral in Davis’s new paintings is the notion of foliage as a connecting thread, both pictorial and metaphorical, describing a taut emotional and private landscape that illustrates the potency of variation. The works are engaged in a simple pared down composition but push an expansive, dramatic and romantic use of language.
Always with the goal of achieving visual pleasure, the paintings are calculations of light shifts, the space that trees occupy, the reverie that happens when looking out a window, reminding us of our fragile coexistence with the natural world and its everlasting powers.
Mel Davis is a Berkeley, California based visual artist. She grew up in Montréal, graduated from Concordia University in 1998, then moved to the Bay Area to complete her Masters in Fine Art at the San Francisco Art Institute, (2005). She is represented by Larry Becker Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She is part of numerous private and public collections, some of which are Hyatt, Capitol Group and Wellington Management and she is the winner of The Canada Council For The Arts Grant and the Irene Pijoan Memorial Award for Painting.