Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 7, 1993 TAG: 9302050155
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: BECKY HEPLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
A MIGHTY HOT PALETTE
Carole Davis is a bona fide citizen of Southwest Virginia, but her art is clearly grounded somewhere else.Look long enough at her watercolor close-ups of tropical plants and soon you start to slip into that languid, damp atmosphere where the sun warms not only with its heat but with the way it colors the world.
"It all started when I went on a vacation to Florida in March and came back to Blacksburg on a day just like this," she said, indicating the gray, drizzling rain. "It was a way to extend that vacation."
In the four years since, Davis has created a series of paintings that have garnered awards in many juried shows, including the National Works on Paper Show in Garden City, N.Y., her first national show. Her picture for that show was incorporated into the program brochure's cover.
Part of this series recently has been on display at Mill Mountain Coffee in Blacksburg. Davis also can be found at Miller and Main Gallery.
The artwork has proven to be popular with the public, and many of the pictures have ended up in private and public collections.
Radford University, Montgomery Regional Hospital and Dominion Bank are a few of the local corporations displaying her artwork.
"My focus has always been: Fill the page in a dramatic way, make it as colorful as possible while still being faithful to what I see," she said.
Tropical plants allow her to indulge her love of color. "These plants don't look like they could possibly grow that way in real life, and yet they do."
Davis has lived in Blacksburg since 1971 and she contends it was the best move her family ever made, so much does she love the area. Nevertheless, she concedes that it can't match up with warmer climes in some respects.
"The sky and ocean and plants are so incredibly vivid in the tropics," she said. Only in autumn does the New River landscape approach that intensity. "Color is so important to me that it is hard for me to paint a typical landscape."
Davis' work is representational, and, indeed, the picture of the agave plant with its stiff, prickly ends looks real enough to avoid. Yet she thinks the extreme close-up view gives it an abstract quality. Gerrit Henry, a New York artist and juror for the Artemis XII show, compared her work to Georgia O'Keeffe's for this reason.
While she paints many differents plants, the recurring themes seem to be agaves and codiaeum, sometimes known as crotons. "Codiaeum is a wonderful plant to paint," Davis said. "It's an explosion of color." Painting agaves tends to be a more monochromatic exercise, but the designs on the plants and those created by shadows and bright spots of sunlight provide plenty of fun for Davis.
She confessed that her inexperience with tropical plants had her mistakenly calling her first pictures "aloes" instead of agaves. "I'm not going to go back and rename those pictures," she said.
Although Davis has worked in other media, her favorite is watercolor. She uses a technique called glazing that allows her to layer the colors and keep the pigments separate and distinct. She said this better translates the confetti-like background found in the tropics. Davis is partial to deckle-edged papers, and she extends her work to these uneven ends and mats the picture to allow them to show. "Otherwise it would be claustrophobic, and these pictures need room," she said.
Davis has always known she would paint. "I remember announcing to my family that I was going to be an artist," she said. She had taken art courses and studied under various artists. When she got to Blacksburg, she finished her art degree at Tech.
A place of great natural beauty such as the New River Valley cries out for landscape painting, and Davis tried her hand at it when she arrived. "But it's kind of ordinary and so many people do it well," she said. She decided to look for another niche.
That led her to close-ups of natural things. Before she painted tropical plants, she worked on deciduous leaves, usually in their autumn colors. "You realize, don't you, that leaves aren't naturally green? That's just the chlorophyll working," she said. She specialized in works that emphasize composition and color.
She had just about exhausted the subject when she made her trip to Florida. "I hadn't intended to make a new series of these; I was just trying to create a memento of my trip," she said. But then the color potential captured her.
"The interesting thing is, I paint only leaves, no blossoms," she said. While the blossom is normally the focus of most plant pictures, Davis said she found enough color in the foliage, especially with tropical plants, that she could ignore the blossoms.
She has a few pictures that incorporate a larger view, including one that glimpses a corner of a swimming pool through a frame of green leaves, but she doesn't see herself painting the larger view of a tropical landscape. "You really have to know an area well in order to do it correctly," she said.
Davis did try that larger view, though, for a special project that is dear to her heart. Called "Watershed: Three Views of the Land," this show presents acrylic landscapes of the Ellett Valley done by Davis, Martha Dillard and Jan Bos.
The three friends want the show to express their respect and love of the land. "It's been a grand time, traipsing about the cow pastures and talking with the people who live here," Davis said. "This is High Top Mountain that you see from my window here," she said, pointing to the view from her living room. "But I have found all kinds of other views of it to incorporate into my painting. It's especially dear to me at the Shannon site, the Indian archaeological dig that's now the site of the clubhouse at the country club."
The show will be at Squires Student Center in April. It has shown at Martinsville and will tour several museums.
Davis continues her close-up views of exotic plants, but she sees a change coming ever since another trip, this one to the Big Bend country of Texas. There, she photographed pictures of cactus, more plants with fascinating textures and patterns. "This time," she said, "I'll probably paint the blossoms."