“The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture, and a highly creative feverishness…” — Francis Bacon

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When I asked Miriam Davis about her show title “Art is a Verb”, she said “The main thing for me is the doing, the making. That’s why art seems like a verb. It’s active, it’s a process, and there are always hints and intimations of something new about to swim into view, and there’s an eagerness to pursue it.” This 2024 show continues to reveal her pleasure in the making, in the “arting”, with materials both old and new.  

Her recent porcelain clay sculptures of women in interesting situations are on display, poking the viewer to interpret what is going on.

Miriam says, “The pieces in this show represent what I've been working on over a period of time. I get a notion and I start working with the material, the material talks back to me and I get a dialogue going and it develops for quite a while, and then a new idea comes in and has more enchantment and so I follow that notion and see where it takes me. Why not?”

With the paintings in the show, Miriam sends us into land and sea and air scapes, spacious floating worlds of large sculptural cloud and flower forms and tiny details transferred from magazines and books. Her pen and ink drawings, in contrast, are intimate interiors all about the details. These drawings were made over a period of years in several of Miriam’s kitchens and studios.

As a creator, Miriam can’t not make art— “how lucky, to be able to take delight in something so accessible— ordinary materials, their color and texture, their response to touch; how you can move them around and combine them, layer, twist things up, sometimes come up with something you know will offer a little surprise to someone who looks carefully.”

A fragment of cardboard becomes a gold dwelling. . .

. . .and thin wire becomes a delicate tower.

“I experience art as a gift,” Miriam tells me, “and that gift can be made manifest. There’s the image, the idea, and then there’s the work to bring it into the world.”  

Come and see these gifts!