Brett Douglas Davis
Artist’s Statement


This thing I’m doing, it just barely happens. In the gaps between thoughts lie the dormant seeds of our compulsive desires and neuroses. My images depend heavily on their ability to speak from those oscillating increments of half-logic, from fear and anxiety. Art is a tool to help make everything that is weak and loathsome in me into something powerful and isolated. Consequently the ensuing activity shifts (almost imperceptibly) from prayer to pleading and back again.

In other words, making work makes me useful to myself. Paint renders tactile the obstinate and elusive layers of consciousness. It reveals and it revels. It is penitence laced with luxuriousness.

I strive for a duality of foggy malaise and cold sharpness in both imagery and handling of materials. Or, put another way, never a confirmation of suspicions, but a tempering of the conviction with which I suspect.

There seems to be an essential desperation blooming from our self-awareness. Thus, everyone is haunted. I aim to cull that peculiar inheritance. As a result, a certain level of automatism pervades my working practice.

In every moment everywhere there is a pitch-perfect ache. I want something seductive and demanding which approximates this. A piece must demonstrate the confounding flexibility to be something very specific while somehow simultaneously being many other things. When I think of a meaningful piece of artwork I think of a blanket. A blanket is a sail. A blanket is a noose. A blanket is a burial shroud.