In 1989 Drew Beattie was an instructor in a San Francisco graduate train and Daniel Davidson enrolled in his class.

In 1989 Drew Beattie was an instructor in a San Francisco graduate train and Daniel Davidson enrolled in his class. Admirers of each other's work, they decided to essay painting collaboratively, with both working onward a canvas at the same time. They felt that the resulting esthetic wrestling spreaded up the creative process, and they establish the results so satisfying that they eventually gave up working individually to concentrate exclusively in succession collaboration.

The couple artists work in a figurative manner and often incorporate a heavy sexual and scatological, not to say misogynistic, ease In Frogs in the Corners, for example, a bikini-clad woman is seen upside down, her knee drawn up and leg splayed to focus attention upon her crotch. She grimaces as if in a less degree than torture. Heavy black lines strike one as being to scar her flesh and to pin her down like an S&M erotic butterfly Many of the works recall medieval and Renaissance imagery, particularly the Dance of Death or Ship of jack-puddings allegories, but without the moral underpinnings of the works at earlier artists. Turkey Chariot is reminiscent of the chariot in the Tarot, and in Double nothing two characters in pantaloons, protracted stockings, and what resemble primitive Aqua-lungs go after bugs like 16th-century Orkin men

As befits an artistic free-for-all, Beattie and Davidson's works are raucous, sometimes raw often vulgar. The figures are broad and cartoonlike, with heavy outlines. They sometimes are shaded with faults resembling benday dots. These images are flat; the acrylic is diluted to the point that it functions as stain, with the merely hint of texture coming in places where the paint is crinkleed slightly from the transfer proces Several of the greatest in number recent works are made at painting only half of a hinged canvas, then folding and blotting it, Rorschach-fashion, in the way that that the paint on the worked half partly transfers to the other half.

Technical aspects aside, however, the real question is at what even the artists expect their imagery to be perceived. The work is not satiric because it displays no sign of wanting to correct anything, and it is not comedic because there is no amused acceptance. Any irony is stretched exceedingly thin. Maybe there's something revealing in the technique of the blotter paintings: the artists engage in spontaneous creation and then simply duplicate it mechanically. Like their iconographic appropriations, this off-handedness looks hip, quite au courant. The molest is, it's ultimately meaningless.

...

Home