About the Gallery Artists Represented Exhibition Archives Gallery Home Marsha Mateyka Gallery Exhibition Archive GENE DAVIS: Intuitive Color, from Early Works to Stripes an exhibition of watercolors, drawings and paintings from the Artist's Estate               September 20 -- November 1, 2014                                  Press Release Selected Works from the Exhibition Sunball (P348), 1960 acrylic on canvas 88 x 93 inches Concord (P324), 1982 acrylic on canvas 69 x 90 inches Untitled, GD133, 1952 Pen, brush & ink wash 13.75 x 16.6 inches Untitled, GD139, 1952 Pen, brush & ink wash 13.9 x 16.6 inches Untitled, GD40, 1956 Pen, brush & ink, watercolor 17.6 x 11.9 inches Untitled, GD183, 1956 Pen, brush & ink, watercolor 13.9 x 16.6 inches Untitled, GD222, 1956 Pen & ink wash, watercolor 16.6 x 14 inches Untitled, GD202, 1956 Pen, brush & ink wash, watercolor 16.6 x 13.9 inches Untitled, GD223, 1956 Pen & ink, watercolor 16.6 x 14 inches Untitled, GD250, 1956 Oil paint & pencil 16.6 x 13.9 inches Untitled, GD1340, 1981 felt-tipped pen on paper 15 x 20 inches Untitled, GD1342, 1981 felt-tipped pen on paper 15 x 20 inches Untitled, GD1344, 1981 felt-tipped pen on paper 15 x 20 inches Untitled, GD1223, 1981 Colored pencil & marker 17.75 x 12.5 inches Saturn, 1978 acrylic on canvas 40 x 27 inches A few installation views...    Available works by Gene Davis. Press Release The Marsha Mateyka Gallery opens the fall season with an exhibition of rare, early works by the well known, Washington Color School artist, Gene Davis.  This exhibition focuses on the decade of the 1950’s. Gene Davis became an artist in the late 1940’s.  He was 29 and already established as a news correspondent for Transradio Press, covering the White House.  He was a self-taught artist who was inspired to paint, in part by a 1949 article in the New York Times about Vincent Van Gogh (another self-taught painter).  It would be ten years however before he ultimately arrived at his signature vertical stripe motif. In the 1950’s, Gene Davis experimented with abstract expressionism and other modern influences of the time.  His black and white ink wash drawings from 1952 were his first publicly exhibited works.  They are remarkable for their sensitivity to tonal range and spacing.  Their forms may reflect the influences of others but the power and arrangement of light and dark are uniquely the artist’s.  The current exhibition includes 5 examples of these rare, early drawings. Four years later, in 1956, Gene Davis combined watercolor with ink wash and line in a wonderful series of works on paper demonstrating the infinite possibilities and expressive power of color and his own innate sensibility.  His willingness to let watercolor be watercolor; to use pooling color and overlays of transparent colors to create a broad range of color and tone is an example of his intuitive approach.  The current gallery exhibition includes 10 of these watercolors. In these early years, Gene Davis subscribed to intuition over any particular technique, method or theory.  His great talent was his eye and the ability to distinguish variations in color and to manipulate color interaction.  He trusted his instincts, but more important, he had the instincts to begin with! By the end of the decade, he began experimenting with the vertical stripe.  A major, early large painting, “Sunball”, 1960 highlights his transition to the over all, edge to edge, vertical stripe painting for which he would become so well known.  For the next 25 years, Gene Davis explored the many expressive possibilities of colored vertical stripe compositions. In addition to his studio work, Gene Davis was widely influential as a teacher, first at the American University and then at the Corcoran School of Art.  His paintings and works on paper are in major museum collections throughout the country. The Marsha Mateyka Gallery has represented the Estate of Gene Davis since 1996. For further information, please contact the gallery at mmateyka@aol.com or 202-328-0088. Back to Top