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.
Concord is a classic example of his signature style of painting vertical stripes, which he pioneered as a member of the Washington Color School. This work, like many of his other pieces, features a vibrant interplay of color and rhythm through precisely arranged vertical lines of varying widths.
Davis uses stripes in a palette of vivid contrasting colors, including red, white, and black. The stripes are arranged side by side with little to no blending, creating a vivid, almost musical rhythm across the canvas. The eye naturally moves across the painting, following the shifts of color intensity and stripe width, resulting in a dynamic visual experience.
Davis considered the stripe, quite simply, as the most efficient way to arrange colors across a surface. Through a remarkable visual imagination and a constantly evolving color sense, he turned what could have been a limiting compositional device into an endless source of inspiration. “Far from being narrow and confining,” Davis told Gene Baro in 1967, the stripe “has an astonishing potential for breadth and complexity.” 6 “If I worked for 50 more years,” he told Jo Ann Lewis ten years later, “I wouldn’t exhaust the possibilities.”