Tornare — Jamie Davis Art

Abstract painting by Jamie Davis, Tornare

Acrylic and pastel on panel · 36 × 48 in · 2011

Diptych of A Destra o Sinistra and Tornare by Jamie Davis

The Story

The formal reason for painting "Tornare": It is part of a diptych in which I used two colors opposite on the color wheel: blue and orange. After creating this work I realized I was missing a formal element that I call "shape vocabulary," the sum of a variety of forms and shapes in a paintings. The more variety within a work of art, the more shape vocabulary it has. Tornare does not display a lot of variety of shape; I used abstracted rectangular and triangular forms to parallel the experience of being a foreigner, where my Italian vocabulary was very limited. I was in a country where I could merely say basic phrases: How old are you? Do you have a wife? Kids? A cat? These two paintings parallel how a person might feel when first learning a new language. The problem I encountered in attempting to increase my shape vocabulary is that I did not have a reference from which to draw. Therefore, when I relied on my imagination to create the forms, two basic shapes arose: triangles and a rectangles.