Gerald Davis

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See also: Gerald Davis, philatelist

Gerald Davis (born Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1974) is an American painter living and working in Los Angeles, California. He studied at the Pennsylvania State University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1997, and was awarded an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999.

He has been represented by the Black Dragon Society, an art studio in the Chinatown section of Los Angeles, which takes its name from the Martial Arts School that formerly occumpied the premises. Gerald Davis has had his work appear in exhibitions at galleries across the United States, including ApexArt (New York City), Optimistic Gallery (Chicago) and Counterpart Gallery (Los Angeles).

He is known for drawings and paintings that challenge viewers into looking for clues for unexpected circumstances. Gerald Davis has been a visiting faculty member of the UCLA Department of Art.

Themes of sexuality, longing and lost innocence run throughout Gerald Davis’s work. Salvaging from his own personal experiences, Davis’s paintings often capture the turbulence of youth, championing all its awkwardness, embarrassment and sentimentality. Executed with the chastity of cartoon illustration, Davis’s fairytale images are cringe-worthy disclosures of preteen puppy-love, weaving shame and humiliation into Freudian celebrations of identity and acceptance.

Executed with muted tones, Davis’s surfaces replicate remote dreamscapes. Prepubescent misadventures of scatology, sexual experimentation, and girlfriends-that-never-were imbue his paintings with the purifying qualities of confession. Through his practice, Davis strives to expose ‘hidden truths’, excavating intrinsic beauty from the abject and grotesque. His canvases operate as tributes to the subjects they depict, affirming humility as a shared human value.

Davis adopts cartooning as the most logical tool for expression. His images capitalise on exaggerated gesture to convey magnified emotion. Situated between Disney-style animation and the genuine engagement of folk art, Davis’s work is inspired from an unlikely combination of artists, including Al Jaffee, R. Crumb, Robert Yarber [1] and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Presenting this genre on a grand scale, Davis merges the vogue of graphic art with the authority of art history, creating paintings that are both funny and meaningful.