JULYAN DAVIS •   ASHEVILLE, NC

Julyan Davis has painted the American South for over thirty years. He has been represented by Blue Spiral 1 since 1997. Davis began as a landscape painter, with an emphasis on recording the
vanishing South. From roadside folk art to long-demolished motels, from wrestlers at the state fair to the interiors of boarded up antebellum mansions, he has captured hundreds of places now lost to neglect or gentrification. In the past decade, he has populated his evocative canvases with
narratives from Southern ballads and folklore that tour museums of the region in collaboration with musicians, storytellers and historians. Davis’s debut novel ‘A History of Saints’ (set in Asheville during the great recession of 2008) won the Foreward Indies 2021 gold award for humor and is currently a semifinalist for the 2022 Thurber Prize. Davis received a BA degree in painting and printmaking from the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. He has exhibited extensively throughout the UK and the United States. Davis’ paintings are in the permanent collections of the Asheville Museum of Art, Gibbes Museum of Art (SC), Greenville Museum of Art (SC), Morris Museum (GA), and the North Carolina Governor’s mansion and Western residence. Julyan currently works from his studio in North Carolina.

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

Asheville Museum of Art; Greenville County Museum of Art, SC; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Morris Museum, Augusta, GA; Governor’s Mansion, Raleigh, NC; Governor’s Western Residence, Asheville, NC; The Duke Endowment, Charlotte, NC; Sloss Furnaces National Historic Monument, Birmingham, AL; Banker's Club, Cincinnati, Ohio; Skyline Club, Indianapolis, IN; Retirement Systems of Alabama, Montgomery, AL; Birmingham Southern College, Birmingham, AL; University of Montevallo, Montevallo, AL; Samford University, Birmingham, AL; Bascom Fine Art Center, Highlands, NC; Byam Shaw Permanent Collection, London.

The Pioneer Series:

After the publication of my first book, I had an idea. What if my writing and my narrative painting were to fuse fully? What if I were to ‘paint’ an entire novel? In museums and galleries, my narrative paintings; whether old ballads, Napoleonic exiles in Alabama, or covid dreams, again and again had prompted viewers to come with their own stories, their own interpretations of my work. I love that response.

As in my fiction, this new series would be driven forward painting by painting, with little pre-conceived plot. It would be designed for the viewer to complete. Like my writing, the places would be real, the characters entirely drawn from imagination.

This series is about American history, and about our children’s place in a fragile world. It’s a satire about restlessness and the costly pursuit of easy wealth, but it’s also a celebration of the individual spirit and the camaraderie of outsiders.

More than once, driving around with my little boy, I’ve pointed out that nothing we could see around us; not the signs or the mall, not the houses or perhaps even the road itself existed thirty years ago. It was all new, I said, and what was there before entirely gone. So much of my painting has been a response to America’s knack of forgetting its own history.

From Maine to the Everglades, from the Outer Banks to Alaska, I have recorded in over two thousand works the single subject of my career: my adopted country. On a long looping hike there arrives the moment to turn back. I feel I have reached that halfway point. It’s time to revisit the acres of canvas I have covered journaling my curiosity, and to string together my separate worlds into a single universe.

This story travels from east to west, across both the landscape and the palimpsest of this country’s frenetic past. It follows a number of characters who will cross paths on their journey across America. They represent key moments and key forces in the nation’s story; the Gold Rush, the Civil War, the Dustbowl and the Great Depression. As in a dream, chronology itself becomes uncertain and unmoored in the expanse of the New World.

Where shall we begin? 1849 was both the year of the California Gold Rush and the peak of ‘Hen Fever’ (a brief bubble in ornamental chickens that ruined many Americans). With a precious Shanghai rooster and a prairie wagon small enough for poor Betsy to pull herself, our pioneers bid farewell to the old place and head west.