Perspectives: Jay N. Davis

After decades as a working animator, Monroe artist Jay N. Davis finds his way home.

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Back in the eighties, when Jay N. Davis graduated from River Oaks High School in Monroe, Louisiana, he couldn’t wait to get out of town. “The summer I graduated I remember watching the fireworks over the [Ouachita] river and thinking about that Neil Young song Sugar Mountain,” he said. “I was thinking ‘I’m not gonna be around.’ ”

And for thirty years, Davis wasn’t around. He was at LSU earning a degree in architecture, only to realize that he loved design more than he loved designing buildings. He was working for Walt Disney Animation Studios, making films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Meet the Robinsons; and later, live action films including Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—a career that took him to Austin, London, Vancouver, and the other L.A., before home began to exert its inexorable pull.

[Read about another Louisiana artist who draws inspiration from Southern nature, Brandon Ballengée, here.]

Davis’s dad got sick, so he came back to visit more often. He found a house in Monroe’s Garden District that his inner architecture student adored. And he started looking—really looking—at the beauty of Louisiana flora and fauna all around. Now, after a career that’s taken him all over the world, Davis is firmly planted back into his hometown soil, creating art that somehow manages to capture the life force of Louisiana from opposing viewpoints: closely, in the minutest structural detail; and simultaneously from afar in all its wild, fecund exuberance. Sometimes, to see what’s been right there under your nose all along, it helps to look back from a distance.

Davis makes pictures of life in glorious forms both real and imagined. Flowers, birds, seed pods, catfish, waterscapes, and shadowy, mythical beasts—rendered in watercolor, oil, acrylic, and pen and ink—variously bloom beneath his hand. Some, like a study of a magnolia seed pod rendered in colored pencil, are tightly controlled exercises in realism—each cherry-red seed emerging plumply from the pod’s silvery furred carapace. A great blue heron pauses in profile, a claw clamped on each of two cypress knees, and regards the viewer with a monocled glare. Other, more gestural pieces spring from the collision between Louisiana myth and rich imagination. Perched on a barstool, a Rougarou hunches over a guitar and opens its toothy maw to sing. In a glowing oil painting named “Devil at the Crossroads,” a darkly malevolent cloud sends tendrils of dark and light snaking toward the iconic intersection of Southern legend.

"Always there’s this slightly magical quality—a suggestion of some elusive force that shimmers, just beyond the visible spectrum. You have the impression that the painter might be someone who sees a little further than you do."

Meticulously rendered, Davis’s pieces reward close scrutiny. But even his most realistic works aren’t realism, exactly. Always there’s this slightly magical quality—a suggestion of some elusive force that shimmers, just beyond the visible spectrum. You have the impression that the painter might be someone who sees a little further than you do.

[Read about Louisiana artist Chase Mullen's nature-inspired paintings here.]

Davis credits his animation experience with teaching him how to capture what he calls ‘the possibility of movement.’ “Working at Disney you do a lot of drawing from life, a lot of gesture drawings,” he observed. “You’re drawing with your whole arm, which makes you loose. But then you have to tighten up.” Davis explained that to make a picture look as though it’s about to move, he focuses not only on the small details, but also on the composition as a whole.

“Animation demands a clarity of composition,” he said. “First you do a small thumbnail sketch to get the composition. Like you’re seeing it from across the room. And then you pay attention to the details. It’s got to work from far away, but also from close up.”

If the genres Davis paints in are diverse, the mediums he employs are even more so. Depending on the project he might use pen and ink, or colored pencils, or acrylic, oil, or watercolor. Which is his favorite? “Depends on the project,” he said. “Oil is a thing I’ve chased for a long time so being able to realize a vision in oil is very satisfying.” The most difficult? “Watercolor! Because you can’t paint over it,” he said, adding with a laugh, “Coming from animation, I do miss the ‘undo’ button!”

Lately Davis has been experimenting with even more forms of media. He’s printing popular images of Louisiana flora and fauna onto apparel and homeware accessories like accent pillows, tote bags, and coffee mugs. These are available through his website. Then there’s his largest project to date: a 17’ x 14’ mural of a heron and an egret stalking crawfish amongst waterlilies, which will be installed at Monroe’s Louisiana Purchase Zoo & Gardens before Christmas. “I wanted it to look like a big pop-up book for kids. But I don’t consider myself a muralist, so this project has made me use everything I know!” For Davis, the new medium represents a challenge and an opportunity. “I want to create images that people from Louisiana can look at and be proud of,” he said. “Things that are here and are treasures. This is what I want to do.” 

See more original pieces, prints, and homegoods by Jay N. Davis at jayndavis.com, or @jayndavis on Instagram. Studio visits by appointment.