-Name: JMikal Davis
-Born/Based: Born in Kansas City, MO, grew up in Atlanta, GA, and now live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
-Making art since: I started drawing tanks and fighter jets around 5 years old, A move to Portland, OR, when I was 7 had me taking art classes after school, and never really stopped
-Something you’d like our readers to know about you: I have two incredible daughters and I split my time between New York and Stockholm.
-What are three tools/elements you can’t work without? 3M blue tape, spray paint and music.
-What do you think is the most important thing that defines your work as yours? Color and pattern.
-Can you describe your work process? A Lot of the time I will just dive in and see where the painting tells me to go, reacting to the color I use or working to balance the work. Sometimes I will start with drawings. In my ongoing series titled Post Punk, the “drawings” are formed from collaging the blue tape that I have used for masking in other paintings or murals. I use the spontaneous overspray that has collected on the tapes and then use them to construct collages. The collages are then used as the drawings for the resulting painting. Sometimes the paintings change quite significantly from the original but those collage drawings are the starting point for them all.
-Which is the latest project/series/artwork that you had been working on? I have been working on a series of works on paper that evolved out of a new painting series that is a culmination of different styles and techniques that I have implemented in separate bodies of work over time and now exist together in this single body of work. These styles include collage, pattern break down, transparent color layering and trompe l’oeil. The compositions are very loose and I am experimenting with various mark making and tools to produce repetitive patterns.
-Which artists would you recommend us to check out? The Bay Area’s Rex Ray is an amazing collage artist; Daev Momo’s work is amazing; Franz Kupka, an early Czech Abstractionist; Mark Bradford, a legend. I like a lot of the “post vandalism” movement work coming out of Europe.
-What is your personal definition of collage? I think it can be many different things. At times, it’s the intermixing of different materials within a single piece of art. Sometimes a collage can look like a painting and other times a painting can appear to be a collage It’s just another form of expression.
