Artist CV
About
Studied: University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana MFA, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, BFA
Currently lives and works in Venice, CA
Davy has worked with stones, in natural unaltered states, collected from the sea or the earth and has assembled them into a fluid and precarious balance that defies gravity and denies their material identity for over 40 years. In the “Cantamar” series, Davy has carefully selected stones that have been rounded and smoothed by the tumbling effects of the Pacific, at a beach in Mexico by that name. “Cantamar” translates to “song of the sea”. Davy’s sculptural combinations of these stones create cantilevered arcs which appear weightless, floating like clouds or rolling like the waves that shaped them.
The “Smoke Drawings” reference underwater landscapes that have been formed by the ocean’s chaotic currents. He travels with his family and sets up a studio in a house on a beach with a fringing reef. It is only in these temporary homes in Hawaii, Central America, Mexico, or islands in the Caribbean that he creates these luminous, smoke drawings. This begins after 5 or 6 days of exploring reefs, caves, and hidden coves filled with undersea life, coral, and rock formations. These inspiring experiences fuel a feeling of buoyancy and controlled chaos that he then translates into the flowing, organic images found in the smoke drawings.
Woods Davy is represented in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA, San Diego Museum of Art, La Jolla, CA, Grunwald Art Center, Armand Hammer Mus. of Art, Los Angeles, CA, Frederic R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine Univ., Malibu, CA, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA, University Art Museum, CSU, Long Beach, CA, State of California, as well as numerous public, corporate and private collections.