Monroe Artist Jay Davis Returns Home

Novelist Thomas Wolfe once wrote, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Well, that didn’t discourage Monroe artist Jay Davis who returned to his North Louisiana hometown after a long and successful career as an artist and animator that has taken him from Dallas, Los Angeles, London, Austin and Vancouver to the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California.

Born in the mid-1960s, Davis has been on quite a journey since his boyhood days exploring the woods and bayous near his home in Monroe. He has lived his dream of working at Disney for over a decade as an animator on several successful movies. With drawings, computer graphics and remarkable technical skills, he created the illusion of life, mystery and drama in imaginary images that filled movie screens around the world. Today, Davis is back among the bayous and wooded North Louisiana landscape, capturing on canvas what he describes as “the beauty and complexity of the natural world.”

Davis’s journey began at LSU where he received a degree in architecture in 1990. He then moved to Dallas where he worked as a draftsman but soon discovered he didn’t like drawing up plans for buildings, so signed up for a relatively new program in computer graphics at Texas A&M.

“I loved the technical aspect of drawing and designing,” he says. “I just didn’t like buildings. When in grad school, I focused on animation because I had wanted to work at Disney. I just thought it would be a great company to work for.”

While in grad school, Davis took a course in medical illustration at the university’s medical school. There he drew detailed elements of the human anatomy, an experience he says is a “mixture of art and science to describe something in the natural world.”

All the while, Davis sent samples of his animations to people he knew at Disney. It worked. In 1994, Disney hired him. His first assignment was to work on the 1996 animated musical “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Others included “Dinosaur” and “Atlantis: The Lost Empire.” Davis animated the leviathan that attacked the submarines. His final film at Disney was the 2007 sci-fi “Meet the Robinsons.” He was the supervising animator on Doris, the evil hat. “I probably would have stayed there forever,” he says, “but it was an odd time at Disney.”

Next, a British production company hired Davis to help animate “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army.” Working both in London and Budapest, Hungary, he completed his part in 2008 and returned to Los Angeles. “I was burned out,” Davis says. “I set up a studio in my garage and started painting with oils because it was something I always wanted to do. I was working on a lot of erotic art, dark surrealism at the time, really different from what I’m doing now. It was more LA and New York.”

After a couple of years in Los Angeles, Davis decided to return to the South. He visited New Orleans in 2010, but it was still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. Instead, he moved to Austin, Texas, where he taught animation and attended a botanical illustration workshop that prompted him to move away from his erotic surrealism to painting flowers. Five years later, he moved again but this time to Vancouver, Canada, when a friend there hired him to help animate the fantasy films “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” and JK Rowling’s “Fantastic Beasts.”

While in Vancouver, Davis got word his father had cancer. It was 2016 and he was back home again in Monroe — this time to settle. “My mom is here and I have a lot of friends here,” he says. “I decided to stay. I bought a craftsman house in the Garden District that I love.”

During long walks with his dog and drives into the countryside with his fiancée, Davis has rediscovered the Monroe of his childhood, especially the magnolia blossoms that he hadn’t seen in years. He enjoys exploring the natural landscape and capturing photographic images for paintings back in his studio. At times, especially when out on the bayous, he finds those moments “kind of creepy, scary and exciting.” He’s talking about the snakes and alligators below the water’s surface.

In recent months, Davis’s painting style has begun to change. While his earlier paintings were tightly controlled, his new work is more gestural, abstract and colorful. But the subject matter, wildlife in its natural state, remains the same.

That inspiration, he explains in an artist statement, is found “in the subtle shapes of clouds, the gnarled branches of trees, the peacefulness of landscapes and the vibrancy of creatures that inhabit our world. For me, the curves, rhythms and patterns found in nature are visually thrilling and serve as the catalyst for a new painting or drawing.”

Those “rhythms and patterns” have gained Davis a following for his art, which can be found in private collections in Los Angeles, North Louisiana and along the East Coast. He also painted the “Crawfish Dinner” mural at Monroe’s Louisiana Purchase Gardens & Zoo.

Like most artists, Davis wants viewers to feel something when viewing his work. “I want to make beautiful things that other people find beautiful,” he says. “I want to give them that satisfaction and that pride and appreciation of where we are.”

You see, Thomas Wolfe, one can go home again.

Visit jayndavis.com