Paul Davis: Illustrating The Heartland

It could have been a Paul Davis painting: a white clapboard house behind a white picket fence, a man out front sweeping up prunings from his apple tree. Villagers stopping to chat, dogs barking and wagging their tails, and sailboats bobbing in the harbor down the hill. Small-town America distilled into a peaceful and pleasant moment.

In a Paul Davis painting, however, this tableau would seem to have been plucked from the dim attic of our collective unconscious, startlingly heightened, and imbued with symbolic power.

Paul Davis was part of the picture, not its artist. Leaning his broom against the fence, he showed a recent visitor into his cozy Sag Harbor house along with his dogs: two yellow Lab-Afghan mixes, a mother and son.

Striking Visions

"Afghans are known as thieves and escape artists," he said. "They open drawers and steal things. They're sight hounds, and can spot a quarry miles away."

Something of a sight hound himself, Mr. Davis, who last year won the Art Directors League Award and recently received the Prix de Rome, has been scoping out our national scene for the past 40 years.

Who can forget his striking visions of the American heartland, or his often provocative political images? Copies of his famous 1967 "Che Guevera Lives" poster for the Evergreen Review were defaced when they first appeared in subways, and the magazine's offices were fire bombed. The image evolved into a rallying symbol for the counterculture.

Mac The Knife

In 1976, his Mac the Knife theatrical poster for a Joseph Papp New York Shakespeare Festival production of "The Threepenny Opera" mesmerized us with the allure of the criminal dandy, while the graffiti-inspired poster for "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf" grew to symbolize broken dreams.

Similarly, the artist's mysteriously blissed-out posters and program covers for the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor have become emblematic of drama in the Hamptons.

Politicians, movie stars, cowboys and Indians, family gatherings, jazz musicians, farmers, animals and fields, winter and summer: All have received a kind of definitive homage, a freeze-frame salute from Mr. Davis.

Always There

The elegant wrinkles of Mrs. Phipps of the Saratoga racing family are as vividly rendered as the rather sardonic smile of the family dog Jiggs: lovingly, satirically, but never cruelly, they have been captured for posterity.

"A lot of the paintings I've done seem to have always existed, and all I had to do was paint them," he said. "They look very familiar, and seem to come from a deep core that's accessible because it also exists in other people. I feel like I'm a conduit for some kind of common knowledge."

"As Joe Papp once told me," he said with a laugh, " 'You really have a gift for the obvious.' 'I think I'll take that as a compliment,' I answered."

Mr. Davis's uncanny ability to communicate his heightened vision of things and people springs from a peripatetic childhood, he said.

Parsonage Memories

Born in Oklahoma in 1938, this son of a Methodist minister and a schoolteacher lived in Arkansas from 1940 to 1946 while his father served at various bases as a chaplain in the Army Air Corps.

Back in his home state after the war, he was whisked from parsonage to parsonage and school to school as the church moved its clergy and their families around.

"A lot of my work comes out of that," he said. "Memories of my childhood are much more vivid than my memories of last week, perhaps because we moved so much. And because I came to New York at 17, I think I'm more intensely aware of them than if I'd stayed home, where time might have blurred them."

Personal Past

As he struggled to find his voice as a young artist, rural scenes kept coming to mind. Among many early works, which he did for the Olivetti company, are a series of 12 illustrations for a deluxe edition of Henry David Thoreau's "Walden, or Life in the Woods."

Ecstatic paintings of the pond and its denizens in the changing seasons - a woodchuck on a hummock, a loon, a moonlit frog, the cabin in snow - reveal the animated nature at the heart of his work.

"My paintings are about rural rather than urban America," he said. "They're Tom Sawyer-like, and about the outdoors with people on horseback, out quail-hunting, camping, canoeing, and fishing."

Both his grandfathers were sons of Civil War veterans, homesteaders who lived in sod houses on farms in the Southwest. One of them never even finished school.

Not Talking

"He and his brother just got some horses, rode to Texas, and had wild frontier adventures. Their stories about Indians coming into the house and stealing food, and about the prairie fires in western Kansas, seemed more immediate to me than real life."

At the age of 15 Mr. Davis decided to become a magazine illustrator, and his father arranged for him to study with his hunting buddy, the artist David Santee. The two men would sit for hours in a duck blind without speaking.

"I learned a lot working in his studio," said Mr. Davis. "I was known as a silent type too, and jokes were made about our nonconversations. But I was very comfortable doing watercolors and not talking."

New York Start

Coming to New York, he studied at the School of Visual Arts, at first called the School of Cartoonists and Illustrators, graduating in 1958 after a short tour in the Army. The Abstract Expressionism of Pollock and de Kooning was the rage, and seemed progressive and sophisticated to the 20-year-old. Along with his artist-dreamer nature was a practical side, however; it kept telling him to be an illustrator, not a painter.

"I wanted something down to earth," he said. "I was inspired by the realism of the previous generation, especially of Georgia O'Keeffe, and I knew I'd have to earn a living."

When he was still in school his pragmatic side had prompted him to acquire a portfolio and an agent, and he was lucky enough to sell a few drawings to Playboy before graduating.

Wrong Turn

Thinking smooth sailing lay ahead, he was caught in a spell of foolishness, rushing into marriage with an actress and reverting to childlike drawings inspired by Klee and Miro.

His agent was not amused. "Great, you can do this stuff on your lunch hour," he said.

"Suddenly, everything was a disaster," Mr. Davis remembered. "Be tween us, my wife and I earned $31 a week."

Finally a divorce and a job at the Push Pin Studios, of Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast fame, brought work and stability. His illustrations began to be widely published and exhibited at home and abroad, winning national and international medals and awards.

Target Practice

After seeing a Jasper Johns show, Mr. Davis took to the folk-art tradition of painting targets and, in line with the tradition of shooting two or three discreet bullets at them, threw darts at his.

"I liked the idea of shooting but couldn't keep a gun in my apartment," he explained. "It was an odd practice, but very popular, for some reason."

The '60s and '70s were great years for such magazines as Esquire, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and the like, and Mr. Davis traveled widely on assignments ranging from Greta Garbo, sex at Bard College, and the Kennedys at Hyannis Port, to a tour of France with Fran‡ois Mitterand to create a portrait for his Parti Socialiste poster.

Going On Line

Now, with the decline in magazine circulation, illustration is moving to the Internet. He recently became an Applemaster, one of a group of people, including Richard Dreyfus and Muhammad Ali, who have been chosen to use Apple technology to create special effects for digital storytelling on line and in film.

Mr. Davis met his present wife, the former Myrna Mushkin, at Push Pin Studios. They were married in 1965, moved to Sag Harbor three years later, and have a son, Matthew, who is a television director and editor in Los Angeles. Ms. Davis, a writer and editor, is the executive director of the Art Directors Club.

John, a son by Mr. Davis's first marriage, teaches grade school in Naples, Fla., and has two children.

Contemplating an approaching six-month stay at the American Academy in Rome, the artist said that while having nothing specific to do had always been his dream, it also contained uncertainty.

"I hope I can be open and let whatever comes come," he said. "As Saul Steinberg once remarked, 'If I knew what was going to happen in the studio, I wouldn't bother to go there.' "

"Like that."