Beacon Gallery has the unique opportunity to meet and work with a range of artists, partners and members of the wider art community. Beacon Gallery Connections allows us to take a closer look at their personal journey, and get a better understanding of their relationship to art.

Meet The Artist: Malcolm Montague Davis & TAC

Beacon Gallery’s current show (through March 11th) is called “Praxis: Malcolm Montague Davis” and features Davis’s extraordinary paintings and models in a one-man show dedicated to selected themes from Davis’s work.

Davis’s colorful paintings and the models on which he based them are rooted in his training as an architect. He graduated from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1958 and went to go work at The Architects Collaborative soon after.

The Architects Collaborative is well-known in the world of architecture. It was founded by eight leading architects, including Walter Gropius, one of the founders of Germany’s Bauhaus school, and a pioneer of modernist architecture.

To learn more about the importance of The Architects Collaborative, here is a good article from Architecture Boston.

Davis’s years with the firm were spent working both in the Boston area as well as in Rome and Yangon, Myanmar, where he helped to design such buildings as the University of Beirut and the University of Yangon. Eventually, Davis went on to join another practice in the Boston area where he continued to design both residential homes and commercial buildings.

Davis began painting about eighteen years ago once he retired. He focuses on both man-made and natural forms in his work. This process often begins with a model, which he creates and then photographs from different angles and with different light. Davis then designs his color scheme to reflect his artistic intentions.

As Davis says in his own words, “The paintings are generated from my architectural drawings, which have been surveyed to yield visually stimulating compositions. Colored paper maquettes are made to study the proportions and color relationships. From these paper studies, candidates are culled to be enlarged into paintings. A single building may result in several paintings, which depict its diverse features.

Paintings are also generated from my sculptures. The sides are colored to convey a concept and to represent a particular locale. The sculpture becomes a mandrel, or mannequin, onto which the color system is applied.”

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Come check out Davis’s work while it’s up at the gallery, and join us for a talk by Malcolm Montague Davis on his work at 6 pm on Saturday, March 10th as part of a closing reception!

 

 

 

4 responses to “Meet The Artist: Malcolm Montague Davis & TAC”

  1. Great show, Malcolm. See you on the 10th at the closing reception.

  2. […] We at Beacon Gallery wanted to highlight the fact that some of these were actually the work of The Architect Collaborative, of which Malcolm Montague Davis was a part. He helped to build universities in the Middle East […]

  3. Hmm is anyone else encountering problems with the pictures on this blog loading?
    I’m trying to find out if its a problem on my end or if it’s the blog.
    Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

  4. Hi there – this is an older post, but when I clicked on it, the images are still loading ok!

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