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JULYAN DAVIS | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT
JULYAN DAVIS | AN ARTIST’S STATEMENT
In my current series, “American Ghosts,” I am trying something unusual in narrative art; with no prior text, it is a novel of awakening written only in images. The unplotted story crosses the breadth of America and a century of history (1850-1950). It brings together much of my prior art: hundreds of paintings that documented the natural landscape and vanishing architecture of my adopted home. It also ties into past narrative work that explored folklore, legends, and lost histories.
“American Ghosts” follows the interweaving paths of three fictional women, personifying three key moments of American history: the Gold Rush, the Civil War and the Dust Bowl. In an allegory of both the Gilded Age and Westward Expansion, the ghosts of Betsy, Belle, and Nancy gather a caravan of outliers on their journey across history and the land herself.
Some years ago, I read that L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was in fact a mournful allegory about the collapse of the Populist movement. His subterfuge may have made an impression on me. In my fiction writing I have since used a light touch to convey weightier messages, and in this new narrative I am doing the same–following a string of characters that might people a children’s story to tell America’s complicated history. My ghosts and I are on a path of discovery. I’m eager to see what history will teach us next.
Julyan Davis is a British-American painter and novelist living in Asheville, North Carolina. For more than thirty years, he has painted the vanishing landscape, lost histories and folklore of the United States. Davis has collaborated with poets, musicians, historians, and, most recently, actors in bringing these stories to life. His novel, A History of Saints, was a semifinalist for the 2022 Thurber Prize.
