FINE ART: Big questions, other realms

It takes some probing to understand how they balance these principles. He says he doesn't take himself or his work too seriously, but his paintings and photographs convey a poignancy; she's deemed serious, but her work looks playful. He sees art as a continuation of the child's imaginative play; she sees art as a way to express the ineffable. He likes to start with the concrete, tangible and real (say, sculptures and photographs), then use those images in his paintings to express mankind's existential dilemma (who are we, where did we come from, where are we going?). Although her photographs were the inspiration for her paintings, she sees them not as a concrete reality, but as an unmasking of a spiritual realm, which then becomes concrete by the sensual act of painting.

Davis' spirituality is different from Howard's. Raised in a Catholic family, he was surrounded by religious iconography. Even though he's not religiously observant, he says the images "stick in your head." As an art major in college he was exposed to many images, but one in particular, of a lone man on a mountain, gazing into infinity, had a profound effect on him. The artist, Caspar Friedrich, sought through nature itself—not an icon or a crucifix—a way to convey the sublime mystery of creation.

Other influences on Davis' work lie at the opposite end of the spectrum: memories of cobbling together astronaut costumes out of cardboard boxes (he grew up in Pensacola, Florida, the home of Pensacola Air Base) and pop—culture references from cartoons and movies (The Jetsons and Star Wars, for example).

When designing what he thinks of as his "alter ego," Astrobot (a robot/astronaut hybrid), Davis gave him a pudgy body, ineffectual claw hands and feet that can only hop and shuffle—then placed him in realistically painted, people—free landscapes. It was Davis' stroke of genius to make a somewhat absurd, one—of—a—kind creature to remind us of our essential aloneness. One painting, titled "On the Edge," finds Astrobot gazing at a pale yellow sunset, bracketed by silhouetted, bare—limbed trees; the dark yin seeking the bright yang. "Thinking of Caspar" is Davis' response to his favorite Friedrich painting. In it, Astrobot peers from atop a craggy mountain at the distant void, his cheerful redness belying his loneliness amid the delicately rendered shades of gray.

Howard would never use gray in her predominantly pastel—hued paintings. She depicts ghosts and other supernatural beings in finely calibrated, cotton—candy colors. The idea for this series of small paintings stems in part from her photographic work—by throwing bed sheets in the air and shooting them at slow speeds, she produced blurry, dissolving images, resembling "creatures in a different realm." This view is consistent with her religious belief in supernatural beings. These ghosts provide the perfect subject matter for her love of sinuously curved lines, which she uses to divide the paintings into carefully balanced areas of positive and negative space. My favorite, "Three Evil Ghosts," successfully unites the principles of yin and yang; uncharacteristically dark in color, it's both playful and frightening at the same time. I've concluded that both artists contain elements of yin and yang in different proportions. Each begins with a different premise, exchanging ideas along the way, drawing on childhood memories and unconscious impulses, eventually uniting the yin and yang in their natures, to create a complementary, whole universe.