Refined Oils

Painter Julyan Davis captures the beauty of the South credit: Peter Frank Edwards

In his 1934 book Stars fell on Alabama, Carl Carmer wrote that that state was as different from the rest of America as was “the Congo.” Carmer, a New York State native, lived only six years in Alabama before returning North to write about that “strange country” and his experiences there. More than fifty years later, an aspiring young British artist named Julyan Davis, brought up in and around London, stumbled upon Carmer’s book, read it, and was intrigued by — to use some of Carmer’s subject headings — “Tuscaloosa Nights,” “The Red Hills,” and
“Conjure Country.” Julyan had completed his degree in painting and printmaking at London’s Byam Shaw School of Art in 1988, and not long thereafter flew to the States to travel by Greyhound bus through the Deep South.

This fleeting trip whetted his appetite, as did further reading in Southern history and literature. He was particularly fascinated by the peculiar story of a doomed colony of Bonapartist refugees who settled in Demopolis, Alabama, in the first decade of the 1800s, intending, with little understanding of the unforgiving local climate, to raise grapes and olives. It’s the kind of romantic, ill-fated story that I would learn is always sympathetic to Julyan’s imagination.

By the spring of 1990, Julyan was back in Alabama and staying with a friend he’d made on the spot in Tuscaloosa. There he met the striking Madeleine Bains, an Alabama girl studying acting at the university. I was living, as I still do, in Greensboro, a quiet, once cotton-rich antebellum town thirty-five miles south of Tuscaloosa. That March, a friend who was directing Madeleine in a play brought her and Julyan to spend a Sunday with me — and to see the real wisteria-draped, Greek Revival-porticoed, small-town South. Julyan spent much of the afternoon sneezing — azalea pollen was thick as fur — but he loved the place, and now I have lost track of all his many stays with me. He often brings English friends and relatives to experience what he sees as one of the South’s “genuine articles.” His mother, Suzy, who lives in Bristol, England, and also paints, is a particular Greensboro aficionado.

I felt immediate affection for both Julyan and Madeleine, and we began to visit often. Indeed, I spent the summer of 1991 in England so I’d be around for Julyan’s wedding to Madeleine there that August. By then, Julyan had begun painting Southern subjects, and he and Madeleine settled in the South — first Atlanta, then Birmingham, and now Highlands and Asheville, North Carolina — where they have lived ever since.

Julyan quickly established his central artistic vision of the South — and hoopskirts and honeysuckle play no part in it. An abandoned foundry in a seedy suburb of Tuscaloosa was one of the first Alabama sights he wanted to paint. Faulknerian decadence and the marginalized world of such stories as Carson McCullers’ raw-boned “Ballad of the Sad Café” are dear to his temperament. When he first came to Greensboro, he didn’t know the iconic Walker Evans photographs from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, almost all of which were taken in the immediate area, or the work of Evans’s protégé William Christenberry, many of whose best-known photographs are of Greensboro’s Hale County. But he soon absorbed them, and he cites a photo by Doris Ulmann that illustrates what draws him to the “seamier side” of the South. It’s of, in his words, “a girl of singular beauty, sitting among a crowd of Appalachian children,” very much the odd one out.

“I’ve always had empathy,” he says, “with the constrained characters of old ballads, and in a way my empty landscapes are haunted by such ghosts… So for me the seamier side is about capturing the day-to-day backdrop for, well, any of our lives. It’s about that pull created between the beauty I see in the color, light, and pattern of something and the objective fact that it would be considered by many to be negligible or even ugly.” His depictions of my home county — old barns, abandoned mansions, a disused bank interior, the outside of a homely washeteria — bear out this empathy, which, through the sensitivity and craft no photograph can realize, often translates into an unsentimental grace.

Julyan works almost exclusively in oils. The first painting he gave me — a casual seated portrait of Madeleine in their Birmingham apartment, with a sketched-in painting on the wall behind her that is also a Julyan Davis — was an oil. So was the second — a deserted Birmingham alleyway as lonely as an Edward Hopper nightscape and as shadowfully eerie as a de Chirico. From the beginning, I was astonished by the range of styles in which he was proficient.