Join us for an afternoon with renowned artist Victor Davson, as he reflects on the cultural, political, and personal influences that have shaped his practice across decades.
Visit to Bayou Road and Other Paintings
By Victor Davson
About his current exhibition here:
Davson’s sensibility as an artist was shaped in early childhood by the diversity of Guyana’s Native, African, Indian, Chinese, and European cultures; by his experiences of both urban and rural life; by travels into the Guyanese rainforest; and by the anti-colonial struggle for independence in the 1960s. Powerhouse writers, poets, and activists such as Martin Carter, Amiri Baraka, Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, Walter Rodney, V. S. Naipaul, Orlando Patterson, and Wilson Harris influenced his generation and fired Davson’s imagination as a youth. His art practice continues to draw on this wellspring of history, fable, myth, and political activism.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, landscape became Davson’s muse. He awoke to the trees and plants around his home—part of his natural environment—as if seeing them for the first time. The pandemic slowed life down, and suddenly he was fully aware of the breathtaking view of the first ridge of the Watchung Mountains in northern New Jersey along the Lenape Trail. The intensity of this fresh encounter with his surroundings sparked a budding awareness of the secret life of trees as sentient beings. Davson recalls, “A sense of panic shot through me: in prioritizing myself I had overlooked the vital contribution of trees not only to my life but to the sustainability of the planet.”
For a time, the work lived in a comfortable intersection of representation and abstraction, resulting in paintings that, while evocative in their use of color, brushwork, and composition, were still instantly recognizable as landscapes rooted in physical locations Davson had walked through or taken in. It wasn’t until around 2023 that the works began to shift from depicting places to representing emotional spaces. Around this time, color also became increasingly important to the work. The exaggerated hues were no longer used merely to denote the passage of time; Davson was not simply trading a green palette for an orange one every six months. Instead, the colors began to reflect the experiential intensity of emotion.
Photograph courtesy of Anthony Alvarez.
Visit www.victordavson.com for more information.
About the artist:
Victor Davson has exhibited widely throughout the northeast United States and in Great Britain, France, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. His work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba, National Collection of Fine Arts, Guyana, Newark Museum of Art, Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey State Museum, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, and Morris Museum. Fellowships and awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper Fellowship, three New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship Awards.
Davson was born in Georgetown, the capital of what was then British Guiana. He received a BFA degree from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York and cofounded Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art to support artists outside the mainstream. His thinking is heavily influenced by the anti-colonial politics of the Caribbean, and by the intellectual powerhouses of that period. These include extraordinary writers, poets and activists such as Martin Carter, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Rabindranath Tagore, V. S. Naipaul and Orlando Patterson. His body of work includes the Limbo Anansi drawings, Bad Cow Comin’ paintings, paintings on long playing vinyl record album covers and recent landscapes begun in 2020.
