The paintings are not made quickly. They are not made carelessly. They are made the way they have always been made — by someone who refused to learn any other way.

 

 

 

Durhl Davis is a Louisiana painter working in the classical still life tradition. His paintings are built in oil using the layered methods of the seventeenth century — umber ground, grisaille, dead layer, glaze. Each work proceeds at the pace the process demands. There is no other pace.

​

He came to painting not through formal instruction but through sustained study of the old masters themselves — their technique, their discipline, their understanding of light emerging from darkness. What the academies teach in years, he pursued alone, painting after painting, layer after layer, until the method became his own.

​

His work has been exhibited in national competitions and held in private collections. He paints because there is no acceptable alternative. The goal is simple and has never changed — to make paintings that reward the patient eye. Paintings that ask to be lived with. Paintings that do not reveal everything at once.

​

​

​

Elected Member — American Artists Professional League Member — Oil Painters of America

​