Burlington artist Bill Davison’s 55-year career in printmaking stretched until his death at age 78 in 2020. He titled his last body of work “Diamonds and Rust,” after the Joan Baez song. It’s a curiously organic choice given the series’ geometric grids and almost architectural massing of forms — not to mention the fact that Davison never listened to music while working, according to his widow, sculptor Kathleen Schneider.
Perhaps he meant “Diamonds and Rust” to refer to life’s “difficulties and contradictions,” Schneider said. “I don’t know exactly what he would have said about it as a metaphor for his life.” Having promised Davison to show the work, however, she chose the phrase as the title of his first posthumous exhibition, which she organized and curated. It’s on view through November 29 at the Francis Colburn Gallery at the University of Vermont.
Not quite a retrospective, the show arranges nearly 50 works nonchronologically. Schneider chose selections from the “Diamonds and Rust” series (2015 to 2020) and several early works dating as far back as 1987, as well as collaborations that Davison did with Schneider; his artist daughter, Kadie Salfi; and several friends. Many of the works, which are mostly titled with their dates, have never been seen in public.
Schneider chose the gallery in Williams Hall, which houses the Program in Art and Art History, to honor Davison’s 42-year career as a UVM art professor. It also honors their relationship: Schneider met Davison in 1978, when, as a returning student, she took a class from him and was inspired to pursue her own career in art.
Echoing Davison’s reference to song, the exhibition opens with three works of music, literally: Davison screen-printed orchestral scores written by composer and friend Morton Feldman on clear sheets of acetate. With John Cage, Feldman was among the past century’s most avant-garde American composers, even designing his own graph-like notation method. Davison’s collaboration places graph on grid: He sewed the acetate sheets onto his own signature grids of colored squares.
The latter are monotypes, or unique one-off prints, created by painting 2-inch-square pieces of plexiglass with watercolors, lining them up in groupings on water-soaked but sturdy Rives BFK paper and running them through a press. The three works with scores, from Davison’s series “In Search of an Orchestration” (2011 to 2013), are printed with horizontal blocks of 12 by four squares on 30-by-22-inch paper.
Davison’s grids are his late-career achievement. A smoker who spent decades using toxic pigments and solvents such as oil-based inks and turpentine, he was diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer in 1999. He quickly switched to printmaking with watercolors, taking classes in New York City so he could teach his UVM students safer methods. He contended with the disease for the next 20 years.
And he changed his style away from the exacting precision of his earlier work, seen in “Cairo” (1987) and “Prague” (1991), two Robert Rauschenberg-like collages with hard-edged forms that incorporate figurative images by Czech photographer Paul Ickovic. Instead, Davison took up grids. A nod to 1960s minimalism and artists such as Agnes Martin and Richard Serra, who were emerging or already established when he earned his master’s in the early 1960s at the University of Michigan, Davison’s grids also allowed for chance: He chose colors at whim in the moment and relied on the monotype printing process, which often leads to unexpected results.
“His work went from precision and planning to accident and chance,” Schneider said.
Davison’s most recognizable grid may be a square made from 16 smaller ones. Schneider included 17 such grids from Davison’s “Snow and Wounds” series (2001 to 2019), each printed on 20-inch-square paper. Instead of showing the works singly in a line, Schneider hung them in a pyramid on one wall. She noted that the formation has inspired viewers to spend time examining how each compares to the others.
Close looking is indeed the key to appreciating these works. Each square within a composition is a miniature abstract painting, its color crisscrossed with fine lines or unevenly speckled or brushed; some are incomplete. Davison cut his plexiglass tiles from sheets he had used as cutting surfaces and reused them so often that they eventually chipped or broke.
Two of the six vertical pieces from the series “Snow and Wounds,” arranged together on one wall, also exhibit extremes of grid disintegration. Each grid of four by 12 squares is printed on 29-by-16-inch paper. Stacked like towers, they were made shortly after 9/11, Schneider said. One, nearly all black, exceeds its boundaries with billows of black ink while white smudges erase other edges. The other appears to have been run through the press twice with the squares in two different positions.
“The old Bill would have rejected these,” Schneider commented with a laugh.
While Davison chose his palette spontaneously, he balanced color within his compositions, as in a dark 9/11-era work with magenta and raspberry squares on two edges, opposite squares of yellow on the other two. Mottled grayscale grids, of which there are several, might have subdued accents in earth tones or bursts of red and yellow.
The embossed texture left behind by the press is one of the things Davison “loved” about his late-adopted process, Schneider said. Texture, or the illusion of it, is one constant across the decades: The rayon-fiber paper he used in earlier works for abstract geometric elements reappears in the 2020 collage “South Hero/Kathleen,” an arrangement of opaque and textured bars, squares and a triangle whose forms resemble an architectural structure seen from above.
Davison also used a sparkly black paper called Carborundum in works such as “Truro” (2020), a collaboration with Schneider. The composition sets Davison’s 1990s screen print of a watercolor still life Schneider made in Truro, Mass., where the couple summered for 30 years, beside Schneider’s 2020 screen print of two roses over Davison’s monotype grid — her gesture of “saying goodbye to him,” she said.
Davison called Carborundum “diamond dust.” That, along with elements such as a shimmering gold rectangular strip in one “Diamonds and Rust” piece, led Schneider to speculate that the series title refers to the “reflective areas and flat areas” Davison created through his materials.
As an exhibition title, it also describes the sum of Davison’s work on display, from the precision-cut edges of earlier screen prints and collages to the disintegrating structures of his later, imperfectly printed monotypes. Both are part of a legacy that has landed Davison’s work in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum — and imprinted it in the mind of any viewer who encounters this dedicated artist’s oeuvre.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Fine Print | “Diamonds and Rust” offers a posthumous survey of Bill Davison’s prints”
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Obituary: Bill Davison, 1941-2020
This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2024.
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