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Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Paul Davis

by John McGee

Paul Davis in front of HOMA, 2001, acrylic on canvas (Images courtesy Nishimura Gallery)

On his recent stopover in Tokyo, Paul Davis, one of New York's leading illustrator/designers, paused just long enough to chat about his career, his friendship with Japanese super designer Tadanori Yokoo, and their current two-person show at Ginza's Nishimura Gallery. 

For 17-year-old Paul Davis, a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts was a one-way ticket from Tulsa, Oklahoma to New York and a successful career as an illustrator and designer. Davis, now 63, is known for capturing the spirit of Americana, especially through his album and magazine covers of the 1960s and '70s. Leadbelly and Dylan, most of the Kennedys, Johnny Mathis, even gallerist Leo Castelli have emerged from the folksy flip of Davis' brush. His famous, heroic portrait of Che Guevara for the cover of Evergreen magazine brought notoriety and near riots when pasted up in the NY subways. He identifies with Saul Steinberg and Ben Shahn, but he has mellowed over time, shifting from Rolling Stone covers to posters for the New York Shakespeare Festival and other theater companies. 

Paul Davis, Uncle Benny, 2001, 
acrylic on canvas, 30.6 x 40.5 cm

This autobiographically-themed show with Yokoo evolved out of a long friendship. The two first met almost 35 years ago and both have had similarly successful careers and numerous exhibitions. However, this is their first show together. Davis jokes that the language barrier isn't a problem because Yokoo's English is pretty good and anyway, they "use ESP to communicate." 

Maybe that stands for Eccentrics' Sensory Perception: Like cultic mandala, Yokoo's paintings indoctrinate viewers into a world of octopus wrestling, extraterrestrial birth canals and demonic invasions. Davis, on the other hand, invites us to meet the family in a homey American Midwest farm town.

Davis cites early Renaissance painters and the naive traditions of Rousseau, early colonial American painting and African sign painting as his influences. But, he adds, "I learned cubism through UPA cartoons." 

In this show, the hybridization of Giotto and Mr. Magoo yields nostalgia-tinged, fanciful, cartoonish portraits of couples that Davis admits are only iconic representations—not individuals but amalgamations of different friends. Uncle Bunny and Lenore are profiles of an everyman and everywoman suited for the side of a retro carnival wagon. 

His self-portrait and portrait of his wife, Myrna, are a soft merger of Picasso's Blue and Cubist periods in shades of blue and gray acrylic. The large canvas HOMA is a vintage postcard view down Main Street, Tulsa. The sidewalk's crammed with people and his mother, grandmother, aunt and grade-school teacher are sitting like audience members in the front row, staring out from the canvas as if watching him paint. 

Davis seems to be revisiting earlier times—his teenage job sign painting for Skaggs Drugstore in Tulsa and afternoons reading comic books at the Owl Drugstore with the Will Rogers High School Cartoonists Club. But he also knows there's no going home again. "I have this theory that every artist starts out to become a cartoonist," says Davis. At the age of 13, he realized he wouldn't make it as one. "My portraits were much more successful than my comic strips," he says. These paintings might support that thought, but unfortunately only Davis himself can judge: He threw out all his boyhood cartoons.

This exhibition was held Jul-Aug 2001 at Nishimura Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo, Japan.

©2007 John McGee

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