Ronald Davis

Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis is an accomplished artist with a career spanning over 40 years. He was professionally trained as an artist and quickly gained fame for his abstract, geometric works of art. Notably, he was one of the first artists from Southern California to gain acceptance from New York art critics for his abstract geometric pieces. Throughout his career, Davis has worked in California and Taos, New Mexico, combining geometry, music, painting, and digital animation in his work.
Davis was born in 1937 in Santa Monica, California, and grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Early on he had no artistic aspirations and attended the University of Wyoming, Laramie for engineering from 1955 to 1956, but dropped out after a year and a half to work as a sheet metal mechanic. From 1957 to 1959, Davis pursued careers both in race car driving and radio announcing , but after a terrifying high speed car accident nearly killed him, he decided to search for a less dangerous career. Inspiration came when he saw the Denver Art Museum’s 1959 Western Annual, where he was exposed to mainstream contemporary art for the first time. He enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1960, where he painted with oil on canvas in an abstract manner influenced by instructor Clyfford Still’s paintings.
He attended the Yale-Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art as a grantee in 1962 and was profoundly inspired by Pop artists and the works of Frank Stella. After graduating, he moved to LA in 1965, where he saw Stella’s “V” series. He responded to the show with a series of monochromatic shaped canvases, which he exhibited in his first one-man show at Nicholas Wilder Art Gallery in Los Angeles 1965. He used perspective lines as a guide to shaping the canvases, which sparked his interest in painting as illusion.
1966 marked the beginning of the most successful phase of his life, when he began using polyester resins and fiberglass cloth in a similar way to the construction process of fiberglass car bodies, surfboards, and boats. Liquid resins were brushed onto the pieces from behind into a mold and then laminated to a fiberglass cloth impregnated with resin to provide support. His first series of works created in this medium were shown in a solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York that year. The show received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics such as Michael Fried, whose review in Artforum helped launch Davis’ career. Fried wrote:
Ron Davis is a young California artist whose new paintings, recently shown at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, are among the most significant produced anywhere during the past few years, and place him, along with Stella and Bannard, at the forefront of his generation.
That same year, Barbara Rose coined the term “Abstract Illusionism” and celebrated Davis’ work:
Davis’s paintings are superior to work that merely takes advantage of the technical properties or effects of new materials because the issue that they are made of plastic is not peripheral or after the fact: that the paintings are made of plastic is central, even crucial, to the definition of a highly developed illusionistic space as not literal or actual but entirely abstract and imagined.
Davis continued working in this medium, playing with illusion and disorienting, impossible points of view. The paintings and objects he created (including Untitled of 1967, from the Virginia and Bagley Wright collection) became more colorful, and he quoted Jackson Pollock’s style in such a way that brought attention to the two-dimensionality of his works.. Barbara Rose later commented on a series from this period, “Dodecagons remain an unforgettable and still valid high water mark in the recent history of modern painting.”
In 1972 Davis, designed a studio space for himself in a collaborative effort with friend and architect Frank Gehry. The house was inspired by Davis’ earlier resin paintings and was conceived as a large cube seen in two-point perspective.
In 1973, Davis moved into his new house and abandoned resins and fiberglass. He experimented extensively with his Buchla synthesizer and returned to two-dimensional works on canvas mainly because of the health risks associated with the resins. These enormous paintings featured geometric forms in space defined by perspective grids with three vanishing points made using snap lines. Frame and Beam (76.6) and Open Intersect (from the Wright collection) are examples of this period’s massive scale and Davis’ use of three-point perspective as drawn out with a snap-line. His color application technique calls attention to the flatness of the canvas, despite the illusion of space and depth.
Throughout the next decade he produced more geometric paintings and a “Music Series” of abstract expressionist paintings which borrowed directly from Pollock. These paintings received no press and no reviews, which shocked and surprised Davis. At the end of the decade, he was ready for change and in 1990 Davis left LA and moved to Taos, New Mexico. “I had a very successful career,” he said. “By the late 80s, I’d had enough… Fifty-five one-man shows had left me with the taste of ashes.” He took a break from showing his work and later reflected, “I stopped painting for a while because I couldn’t see any reason to make objects in the context of the 1980s, for the sake of ‘show biz.’”
During this break, he collaborated with architect Dennis Holloway and anthropologist Charley Cambridge to build a studio and living space based on Navajo dwelling known as a hunda. In his studio, he produced encaustic pieces, wooden sculptures, and digital drawings. He created watercolors with his son and continued to explore the idea of Navajo dwellings. He continues working actively to the present.
Davis has had numerous solo and group shows throughout his career in galleries and museums across the United States, including the following: The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. His work has also been featured in multiple traveling shows. Davis’ inventive techniques and developments within the abstract movement have placed him within the conversation of abstract painting in America.

-Camille Coonrod, Curatorial Intern, 2014