That season brought color. Color spoke first, and she saw that it was good…

I was on one of my usual constitutional walks in a certain tree-ripened South Florida neighborhood when I received a hurried call from Hollye Davidson about the birth of this new series.  Of course, as we spoke, neither of us was aware that we were dealing with a birth, or a series, or even a change of headwinds of any kind.  The artist had simply been ruminating on yellows and had spent quite some time preparing a full canvas of the color in that state of communion that so characterizes painters, and so I thought to myself, “it’s sunny out with an 80 percent chance of Rothko so this chat isn’t a scorcher”.  The next thing I knew a week had passed, and our facetime call drew an unexpected interference. 

A human face had emerged on the canvas, and its impact was downright phantasmagorical.  For the rest of that month, Davidson found herself in a struggle with her practice, an encounter that became a series of spiraling inquiries, invitations, and more self-cross examinations than a jury of one could truly follow.  The resulting Portrait of Barbara emerged, a painterly and formal self-sentencing that loomed over the artist’s emerging color-first instincts.

For an artist so centered around her subjects, often human, mostly figurative, this notion of color as the primary protagonist began to persist in Davidson’s process.  This time around, she turned to face it, to give instinct its due place.  The result is this new series where human faces emerge from the color, the subtext, the undertone, and not the other way around.  With Waterlily, the painter was drawn to experience a very particular blue-green from Monet’s palette, and the countenance appears, floating upon the color with a spontaneity that evokes childlike integrity for the viewer. 

Other works, such as Close Reach, emerge as tactical expressions, offering a contemplation of color’s effect on the inner aspects of the subject. The delicate Fifth Season allows the subject’s soft expression to flow with a rare casualness that stands in quiet contrast to the comedian-on-wall driven, self-regurgitating art world extravaganzas that have been duct taped to our collective consciousness. 

This season’s works by Davidson and the exhibition  Let’s Face It: Embodying Color asks to be experienced in person, it calls us to gather around its colors, to be lighthearted for a moment, it insists on the value of the human experience as a central focus and a subject to be celebrated.  So join me on this walk, this synch we are encountering, in vivo, as we meet and greet the 2024 collection of faces by South Florida’s own Hollye Davidson during Miami Art Week.

Gined López Ganem

Miami, Florida, December 2024