A Way to Relax

Pete’s art is unmistakable. His style is somehow bold, minimalist, realistic, and psychedelic all at once. The most pertinent characteristic, however, is that his stuff really doesn’t look like anybody else’s. So much of the work in any fine arts community has these identifying qualities that associate it with a particular school, or telegraph the artist’s influences, but Pete Davies’ art really just looks like Pete Davies art. The most identifiable influence visible in Pete’s work is the landscapes of the American West. The stark and scorched desert country of Arizona and New Mexico – the buttes, ridges, canyons, and hogbacks of California – the vast coniferous forests and snow-capped peaks of Montana, and the primeval temperate rain forests of Washington and Oregon… These are the works of art that Pete Davies is influenced by. Few artists enjoy such unfettered communion with a subject so vast and wild as the Rocky Mountain West, and few art scenes benefit from such an original voice as Pete Davies – An American original.

Pete was born in Ontario, Canada in 1951 and grew up in California. His youthful aptitude for drawing would eventually lead him to an early career as a professional artist, but not without obstacles. When catering a city-wide drawing contest in 5* grade, the level of detail and complexity in his entry led to an accusation of tracing (an accusation he refuted by demonstrating in person his ability to reproduce the work). Entirely self-taught, and focused on capturing a unique and original style, Pete made his first sale in Los Gatos, California (a town noted for its notorious and mysterious colony of savage albinos in the nearby hills). Over his half century as a professional artist, Pete’s work has appeared in galleries from California to Montana and points between, most notably in Art-Tech Gallery of Art and Technology in San Jose, California, and most recently at the Dana Gallery in Missoula, Montana.Pete’s work, largely inspired by landscapes from across the American West, has a heavily psychedelic quality. Each of his landscape pieces is immediately reminiscent of familiar natural formations, but with a distinct graphic quality that distills a vast landscape to its most concentrated essence with an economy of lines that becomes startling as one observes the level of detail in Pete’s images. Though his pieces span a wide array of subjects and styles, his line drawing pen and ink landscapes are his most well-known and most immediately identifiable, and these pieces in particular display a heavily stylized blend of abstraction and realism unlike anything seen in other artists’ work. The closest comparison to the effect of Pete’s work might be the landscapes of impressionist painters, but while Van Gogh and Monet have the luxury of a full color pallet and the texture of oil paints to create their compositions, Pete accomplishes a similar effect with a handful of nearly parallel organic curves. This is not to suggest that Pete’s compositions look anything like an impressionist painting, merely to describe the scale of detail and emotional impact present in his comparatively minimalist compositions.The works presented in A Way to Relax were created over a 10-year span of travels across New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. He has resided in Montana for the last 22 years where he has become a fixture of Missoula’s art scene, his penetrating gaze and wry wit constantly keeping Missoula on its toes. His collectors and acquaintances over the years have included Mr and Mrs Arthur Miller.