Richard Davis

Richard Thomas Davis was born in Middletown, New York in 1947. Although he briefly studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1965-1966, he is largely self-taught. Davis and his wife immigrated to Canada in 1968, first living in Vancouver, British Columbia from 1968 to 1982, before relocating to Nova Scotia where he continues to reside.

Davis is recognized as a photorealist painter whose meticulously rendered works capture everyday scenes with remarkable precision and stillness. He works in a demanding technical process of oil over tempera emulsion, often on honeycomb panels. His subject matter ranges from landscapes and cityscapes to portraits and ordinary objects, all rendered with exacting detail and an almost tangible quality. As critic Tom Smart noted, Davis's paintings "point to real times and places existing both in the past and present" with compositions that suggest "something feels slightly out of kilter as if change is imminent."

In his artist statement, Davis explains: "Beauty in the mundane is a theme of much of my art. I use the beauty and clarity of a well structured painting to give a feeling of importance, rightness, to the often mundane objects I paint." He sees himself more as a "translator" than a storyteller, interested in "the stories things tell me than in the stories I might tell."

Although Davis exhibited primarily in the United States from 1984 to 2009, he returned to showing his work in Canada in 2010. His paintings have been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and can be found in important public and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Vancouver Art Gallery. In recognition of his contributions to Canadian art, Davis was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2011