There’s no place like home
Landscape artist Jim Davies finds peace right at home
Having produced paintings from many places over four decades, artist Jim Davies finds the perfect workplace. Studio Inside by Janice Ryan,
Artists are extremely original when it comes to creating a space to unleash their vision; where their ideas are transformed with paint, steel, clay and glass into something tangible and fragments of thought are translated with brush strokes, fingers and torches into work that touches the soul. They will always find a way to carry on their practice.
Local landscape artist Jim Davies has been painting professionally for 34 years and has experienced a gamut of studios — from a scuzzy attic room in a downtown Toronto rooming house in the ’70s (he received his bachelor of fine arts from the University of Guelph), to academic classrooms, dilapidated warehouse spaces and office spaces in old commercial buildings.
In 1979, Davies moved to Edmonton to pursue his master’s degree at the University of Alberta. He remembers one studio where he stepped over the sleeping bodies of homeless people lying in the lobby to get to the elevator (which sometimes worked). Upon opening the studio door, a flock of pigeons would flap and flutter, setting his heart racing. Yes, artists are a resilient bunch.
When Davies and his wife purchased their house in the Crestwood area 12 years ago, he knew the sun porch overlooking the backyard would make a perfect studio — the natural light was exquisite. For a painter, light is the purest of gifts.
Two Plexiglas walls and a clear roof make this 14-by-27-foot space a bright haven. Work tables hold paints, brushes and supplies while easels and nails sticking out from the wood frame provide options for hanging canvases to paint and display.
The Astroturf flooring is easy on the feet and the eight-foot ceilings accommodate all but the largest pieces. The 25-foot landscape hanging in the Francis Winspear Centre for Music was painted in a west-end warehouse. Finished works are stored in a small shed.
“To have my own studio space is spiritually and physically meaningful,” says Davies. “It is good for my creative well-being; it’s a refuge and escape. This is a place no one else can tell me how to keep.
“When I am painting here, there is no sense of distraction. I’m completely focused and my cares and fears evaporate.”
On one wall, Davies posts pictures, poems and statements — things that motivate or anger him, or make him contemplative and encourage a sort of reverie.
“One of the advantages of a home studio is that I don’t have far to go when I feel the urge,” he says. “The hours I work depend on my level of motivation, and exhibition and commission deadlines. When I was a little younger, I would sometimes work all night and then go to work the next day. I can spend up to 10 hours working if I’m really firing on all cylinders.
“I also like not giving my dollars to a landlord. I rented studio spaces for more than 25 years; it could’ve been a mortgage.”
The one drawback to the sun porch is that it’s not insulated or heated; it can days and frigid Even dressing
the space from early May
Come winter, practice to a
cubby hole of lockers at where the U of
classrooms live. Davies has instructor with years.
Access to this is no interruption The restricted he only works a time. As much a key to an artist’s adaptability.
heated; it can be an oven on hot days and frigid during the winter. Even dressing to suit the conditions, the space is only practical from early May to late October.
Come winter, Davies moves his practice to a four-foot-by-eightfoot cubby hole behind a bank of lockers at Enterprise Centre, where the U of A faculty of extension classrooms and studios now live. Davies has been a sessional instructor with the faculty for 22 years.
Access to this space ensures there is no interruption to his artmaking. The restricted size, though, means he only works on one painting at a time. As much as resilience is a key to an artist’s success, so is adaptability.
“I tell my students to carve out a space they can call their own. Some have studios at the faculty, others work from their dining rooms. You don’t need the ideal to be motivated to work.”
Davies also has a third, yearround studio: the great outdoors. Here he paints en plein-air — in the open air — enjoying the challenges of the elements.
“I like the physicality of being outside,” says Davies. “I feel at peace.
“Van Gogh likened being outside to a religious experience — to being connected to all living things. I like that way of thinking. I knew I was meant to make my home in Alberta. I am physically and emotionally affected by the environment here.”
Davies has been influenced by several prominent Alberta artists, in particular, plein-air landscape artists Les Graff and Illingworth Kerr (he was mentored by A.Y. Jackson of the Group of Seven).
Inside, Davies works in acrylic on big, stretched canvas tableaus, but outdoors he does studies in oil on prepared wood panels, something he learned from Graff about five years ago. He also paints with pastel and watercolour, indoors and out.
Davies has hiked boreal forests, prairies and the Badlands, canoed and camped, carting his paints and brushes along the way.
“The Prairies enables me to feel something totally different than what it was like growing up in Toronto … open space and endless shifting weather patterns. The light in Alberta is brittle and hard, not like southern Ontario.”
Davies leans toward a sombre, moody palette with hits of bold colour. He’s known for his expressive mark-making. Life and energy pulse through his work.
“My work has always dealt with issues of loneliness or more appropriately, aloneness, in the midst of the beautiful prairie vistas,” says Davies. “The nocturnes (night paintings), dramatic big skies and aerial perspective landscapes I paint have a lonely, haunting quality.”
In addition to the Winspear, Davies’ work graces many public spaces throughout the city: 15 poetry/paintings in acrylic or watercolours, a creative collaboration with local writer/poet Stuart Adams, hangs in the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute and a large painting at Government House is being installed to celebrate their centenary.
“Being an artist is full of challenge, heartache, joy and confusion ... trying to sensitize yourself to the muse.”
Jim Davies is represented by Scott Gallery in Edmonton. View recent paintings at scottgallery. com. Additional studio photos at edmontonjournal.com/life.
“Van Gogh likened being outside to a religious experience — to being connected to all living things. I like that way of thinking.
Jim Davies