Amy Brewer-Davenport on process en plein air
As I bump my way along the gravel road high above the Sequatchie Valley, it occurs to me I’m coming to the oddest place in the world to discuss painting in public—painter Amy Brewer-Davenport’s closest neighbors are crows, lespedeza, and scrub pines.
Inside, too, her studio’s a self-contained aerie of orchids, boxes of craft supplies, and paintings. So many paintings.
A technicolor dog grins at me—a surprise picture from a friend, Amy tells me. She paints from nature, from photos, from her imagination—“I get so bored doing one thing over and over!” After a handful of paintings in one style, she’ll move on to another.
Right now she’s working on a series of crow paintings in shades of onyx and charcoal. She lets me touch one, and I imagine I’m handling the wall of some long-abandoned Roman villa. It’s an acrylic palette-knife painting on top of older, gessoed-over palette knife work, she explains.
“I [touched it] this very morning!” Amy says. “I always touch my paintings. I have a hard time in museums because I’m so tactile.”
She shows me stacks of canvasses representing “paint parties”, where she gathers with patrons who drink and chat while they work from one of her paintings. She paints over these canvasses and reuses them—“I gessoed eight canvasses yesterday! It’s very cathartic. It was fabulous!”—in a gesture that indicates a certain temporality to her art. She creates something, she paints over it. Creates it, gives it away. Creates it, posts it on Facebook, makes a sale.
Painting in front of people, whether at “sip and paint” events, private painting parties, or multi-artist performances, puts the nature of “art” to question. If you paint en plein air—out-of-doors—you’ll get observers sometimes, of course. They’ll comment or take smartphone photos of you painting, or just stop a few seconds to glance at your sketchpad and watch the work taking shape.
But if you go somewhere on purpose to paint in front of others, the act of painting itself, rather than the finished product, becomes the art object. And more and more frequently, live painting is part of the entertainment.
In Chattanooga, live painting demonstrations have accompanied hip hop performances, poetry readings, and dance shows. At one event, the painter turned her canvas around at the end of the show to display a Lautrec-like impression of the audience.
At another, a potter worked in clay, reproducing the woman-centered theme of the evening with the curves of the work on her wheel. What does it mean when people come, not to see your painting or pot, but to watch you paint or throw clay?
“Sometimes it makes me a little uncomfortable,” Amy says. “Sometimes I think it’s cool. I want people to see I’m having fun with this and want to go home and make something of their own.”
She’s applied to a contest that’s all about performance painting: at Art Slam in Knoxville, you set up a prepared canvas and have three hours to complete a painting, as passersby watch you work.
“I’m super-excited,” says Amy, toes wiggling. “I hope I get in!”
Amy, who’s also a belly dancer, relates dancing to her work as a painter.
“They’re all some form of expression,” she says “whether movement of the whole body or through the movement of your brush. Sometimes I feel just as sore from painting as I do from a performance.”
At other live painting events, of course, everyone’s painting. Last week, for instance, Amy was at Hutton & Smith for an event where participants worked from her sample painting to create paintings of beer glasses with imaginative backgrounds.
“Usually they have a fun time playing with paint,” she says. Even though the exercise is based on imitation, “It’s not necessarily to have their creative license wrenched behind their back. I’m not so much a bossy painter, but there are steps [I can show them].”
Amy likes helping people build confidence as they begin painting or develop their skills.
“My biggest thought for people who are inclined to be artistic but are shy about it is, ‘Don’t be’,” she says. “My goal in life is to encourage people to express themselves and learn the tools… to express themselves comfortably so they aren’t worried about judgment, or whether someone’s already done it, or whether they’re good enough.”
Whether the human is good enough, or whether their work is good enough? Amy makes me question the distinction. When it’s done en plein air, we have the joy of seeing a spark wherever it chooses to settle: in the rough texture of acrylics under the fingers, the notes of a well-known sonata—or in the hesitation of the dancer who stands center stage, deciding whether to step right or left, the hesitation of the brush over the canvass—the act itself brought to light.
Find Amy Brewer-Davenport’s work at facebook.com/amybdart or amybdart.com