Noah Davis - 'Spots of Time'

There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating virtue, whence, depressed

By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse, our minds

Are nourished and invisibly repaired;

A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,

That penetrates, enables us to mount,

When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

William Wordsworth, The Prelude

*

A hectic few months at work left me with the need get away from my desk for an hour. My team were due in at six to fundraise and the desire to recalibrate wearied sensibilities was overwhelming. The day before, I’d glanced at a review of an exhibition of the late American painter Noah Davis; noticing that it was only open for another few days, I immediately pushed it to the back of my mind. That the Barbican, the venue of the exhibition, was only a five-minute walk away, brought it urgently back. I booked a ticket and marched on the Brutalist towers, seeking aesthetic salve.

 

I find that an hour - at most, an hour and half - is usually adequate to take in an exhibition. Any longer and stimulation begins to fog. What I hadn’t counted on, however, was that after skirting past just a few paintings, I would be halted. Sitting down in front of Painting for My Dad, accompanied by biography, beauty, and luminosity, I felt one of those moments that Wordsworth described as ‘spots of time’.

Noah Davis, Painting for My Dad (2015)

 

Noah Davis’s father, Kevan, died of cancer in 2011. Just a few weeks before, Davis completed the painting. Four years later, the artist himself died of cancer. The quiet, generational tragedy chimed with this massive and deceptively simple piece of art. Occupying its own solitary area on the upper floor of the Barbican Art Gallery - a softly lit space that felt as stilling and intimate as a Florentine chapel - sitting down in front of it, I felt a mysterious combination of sadness, hope and wonder slowly shift over me.

A figure, vulnerably hunched, head turning slightly to the right, gazes out into a dark - not quite black - faintly, star-speckled abyss (there’s a loud and almost certainly deliberate echo of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above A Sea of Fog here). He stands on a ledge, flanked on either side by not quite golden cliff edges. Wearing a red t-shirt and blue jeans - almost as if death has caught him out, under-dressed for the momentous journey he is embarking upon - Davis’s father carries in his left hand an olive green Davy lamp. The eye is drawn to the centre of the lamp and the shining white light inside, and then out into the softer, more sparkling lights of the abyss. Backwards and forwards, for almost half an hour, I stared, mesmerised and cajoled into that paradoxical sense of both the tininess and inconsequentiality of each of our lives, and the momentousness that we ascribe to our subjective - as it stands - bracketed existence.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818)

Looking up at the uploaded photograph of the painting, it doesn’t come close to doing it justice. The flatness and lack of depth of the reproduction does not capture the sublime nature of the work that I sat in front of. I’m reminded of how little is caught of Mark Rothko’s paintings in reproduction (I’ve mentioned before how I was a Rothko sceptic until I stood before one of his vast, deep, numinous canvases).

Indeed, there is something almost Rothko like - both in composition and colour palette - in Davis’s work. Scurrying through the rest of the exhibition, chancing my arm on getting back to the office in time, I found five minutes to look at a painting called The Conductor (part of a series of imagined scenes set in the Pueblo del Rio housing project in Los Angeles, that attempt to envision moments of transformative beauty taking place in a community without easy access to the arts). 

Noah Davis, The Conductor (2014) 

Look at the use of blue, and indeed, the windows and doors at the centre of the flat-topped house - almost a Rothko painting inside another painting.

I glanced at the time and rushed back to the office, refreshed and thoughtful. Sadly, Painting for My Dad is in a private collection. If it ever finds its way to back to me, I will give it the time and the appreciation that it deserves.