Featured: Joan Elán Davis
by Elisabeth Korb Joan Elán Davis has a vivid memory. “I was five years old on my dad’s shoulders at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, eye-to-eye with a Pollock, when I knew I would be an artist,” she says. Indeed, the young Davis, inspired by her father, also a painter, had clear foresight.Today the prolific artist paints from two studios: one working-only space near her home in Incline Village, the other at the San Francisco Design Center (SFDC), a 3-building, 100-showroom complex in the heart of the city’s design district south of Market. While she’s best known for her floral paintings, Davis recently launched an Art Studios Collection of chair backs and upholstery, pillows, carpets and tapestries. “I’m trying to take furniture from mass production, and make one-of-a-kind pieces that hold their value,” says Davis. “Whereas canvas is just a conduit, the material really becomes part of the art with my home collection.”The Long Island native moved to Incline Village with her family a year and a half ago, concluding a series of relocations—Ohio, Connecticut, Texas and most-recently San Francisco—precipitated by her husband’s job in alternative energy. The city by the bay is where Davis found her niche. “My work was accepted immediately; I felt understood,” says Davis of her 1997 arrival. Sold-out shows followed, as well as an opportunity to exhibit her work alongside Lee Krasner (Pollock’s wife) in Budapest. She worked as a docent at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for six years, and was invited to participate in Hearts of San Francisco in 2004.Entering her loft-style studio at the SFDC’s Garden Court building is like walking into an urban garden. Colorful, original works line the skylight-lit walls; flowers, from boldly painted posies to fine-lined charcoal petals, pop from every angle. “I’ve always said that I’m a floral painter who doesn’t paint flowers; the form simply helps me to be expressive,” says Davis. “I’m really painting a mood, a love of life.” Her paintings on paper and canvas, ink drawings, collages and monotypes all convey a marked energy, yet Davis says she’s most interested in how nature rests within itself, for example, in small objects like tendrils, veins, a fallen leaf. “I love mixing two ends—to allow chaos within the organized form of a square picture plane.” Her collages are particularly playful; she often uses handmade stencils (one inspired by her Victorian home in the city) as well as toys, game pieces or knickknacks lying around her studio to make a mark.Beyond the showroom walls, Davis’s studio is cross-merchandised with complementary furniture from Union City’s Natural Upholstering Company (which is teaming up with the artist to manufacture the chairs and pillows of her Art Studios Collection). Davis is also an industry partner for Northern California ASID and routinely works with industry professionals. “Ninety percent of our business is with designers and architects,” says Brian Ellis, Davis’s director of sales and showroom manager, noting that the surrounding SFDC showrooms cater mainly to the trade. “Joan is very accommodating as an artist, and very decorative,” says Ellis. “She is always thinking how a piece would relate to someone’s home as she is painting it.”For her first Art Studios Collection chairs, she stretched leather over a canvas frame, and then applied several metallic tones and a pale blue. Her inspiration: the shapes and shadows of Presidio eucalyptuses and Lake Tahoe pines. Tahoe has provided other muses as well: A wildflower patch on Lakeshore Drive sprouted a painting in the works at her local studio; snow has prompted more white space, she says. One of her current creations, Lakeside Day I and II, is a diptych inset with crystals.“The energy between San Francisco and Tahoe has kept my work abstract, fresh and uplifting,” says Davis.
HOMESEEKERS TAHOE
Mountain home articles:
