Writer, journalist and painter Gene Davis has played a key role in 20th-century American Art and has been a contributor in establishing Washington D.C. as a center of contemporary art. Without a traditional art education, Davis taught himself through various trips to museums and galleries in New York as well as Washington. During the 1960s art critics identified Davis as the leader of the Washington Color School which was a collective of abstract painters from Washington. Davis also played a significant national role in the Color Abstraction movement during the 1960s.
To view Davis’s work he suggested that “instead of simply glancing at the work, select a specific color—and take the time to see how it operates across the painting.—Enter the painting through the door of a single color, and then you can understand what my painting is all about.” In discussing his stripe work, Davis spoke not simply about the importance of color, but about ‘color interval:’ the rhythmic, almost musical, effects caused by the irregular appearance of colors or shades within a composition.
Gene Davis’s Meandering reflects his exploration of minimalism and geometry. This largely blank sheet creates a contemplative and serene composition that evokes the traditional Japanese concept of Ma, an artistic interpretation of an empty space, often holding as much importance as the rest of an artwork and focusing the viewer on the intention of negative space in an art piece. The curving, winding, or meandering lines that hug the outer edges of the artwork are unlike many of Davis’s other compositions. The wonderful title leads the viewer to bring their own “musings” to the work.
Despite the well calculated appearance, Davis claims that he has never planned a painting ahead of time: “My whole approach is intuitive. Sometimes I simply use the color I have the most of and worry about getting out of trouble later. Perhaps I'm like the jazz musician who can't read music but plays by ear. I paint by eye." Alongside his unorthodox painting method Davis’s work does not follow an orderly sequence, “a tendency to raid my past without guilt [by] going back and picking up on some idea that I flirted with briefly, say fifteen or twenty years ago. I will then take this idea and explore it more in dept, almost as if no time had elapsed between the present and the time of its original conception.” This methodology becomes especially clear with Meandering as this work contains a large blank area within the center of the canvas which was unseen throughout most of his earlier works and did not come about again until the late 1970s.