Born in Santa Monica but raised in Wyoming, Ronald Davis returned to Los Angeles in 1965 after attending school at the San Francisco Art Institute. Immediately he began to employ the experimental materials that many of his colleagues were using, such as resin, fiberglass and lacquer. Instead of using them to harness the atmospheric effects of Southern California, however, Davis played with modern ideas of representation. In Wyoming Slab, the first of his “Snap Line” series and a return to canvas from fiberglass, the artist uses snap-line chalk over a geometric field of dry pigment to address three-dimensional illusionism on a two-dimensional surface. The artist once mentioned that the work was a self-portrait of sorts; when he arrived at art school in San Francisco he was a Wyoming “Square,” as he put it, largely unprepared for the progressive atmosphere in which he was about to be immersed.
Details
- Artist Name: Ronald Davis (American, 1937-)
- Title: Wyoming Slab
- Date: 1974
- Medium: Vinyl-acrylic copolymer and dry pigment on canvas
- Dimensions: 108 x 174 in. (274.3 x 442 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation, Gift of Mr. Norton Simon
- Accession Number: M.1979.44.P
- Copyright: © 2008 Ronald Davis
Object Information
Norton Simon Collection, (N.1974.15.P), gift to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation 1979.
Translucence: Southern California Art from the 1960s & 1970s
- Norton Simon Museum, 2006-05-12 to 2006-08-28
Radical Past: Contemporary Art and Music in Pasadena, 1960-1974
- Norton Simon Museum, 1999-02-07 to 1999-06-06
- Armory Center for the Arts, 1999-02-07 to 1999-04-11
- Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, Calif.), 1999-02-07 to 1999-04-25
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 1087 p. 370
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