James G. Davis ’59/62 James G. Davis, an acclaimed artist with works in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Hershorn Museum and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., calls his style of painting “interim”: “A solution may be somewhere between the equation of a woman in a fur coat and the abominable snowman,” he says.
Enigmatic words, perhaps, borne out by the works themselves: A bar becomes a crowded street; a red canvas is split by birds and still more faces. As he implies, the “subject” of either painting lies somewhere in between. Davis was born in Springfield, Mo. in 1931. He received both a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1959) and a Master of Fine Arts (1962) from the University of Wichita, and went on to teach at the University of Missouri and the University of Arizona before taking early retirement to focus on his busy painting and exhibition schedule.
He and his wife (Mary Anne Ludwig ’64) travel extensively. He maintains studios in Nova Scotia, Canada, Berlin, Germany and Oracle, Ariz. His exhibitions, similarly, range from Santa Fe, N.M. to Bulgaria to right here in Wichita.
