The weekend of May 19 was the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust’s annual fundraising tour, the Wright Plus housewalk, which usually brings in around 2,500 visitors. The Careful Peach Boutique, run by Karen and Peter Morava, timed an exhibit of paintings of Frank Lloyd Wright houses by artist Genevieve Davis to open on this same weekend.
The focus of the exhibit is Taliesin in Wisconsin. Davis, a Wisconsin resident, explains that in 2002, she moved to Mirror Lake, which is an hour north of Taliesin. She was living in a wilderness area with only two other houses for neighbors; one of these was a Frank Lloyd Wright design called Seth Peterson Cottage. It wasn’t long before she started volunteering as a docent and then decided to paint it.
Her appetite whetted, she drove down to Taliesin with her camera, thinking that she’d just be doing a couple more paintings. Three years later, she’d done 20 separate pieces, catching the house, school, barns, and windmill, all designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. She observes, “It’s just an overwhelming place. There’s so much going on visually. Everywhere I looked there was something exciting to see, a lot of geometry.”
Part of the charm of her paintings lies in her choice of angle and distance from the subject. In some of the pictures she moves in very close to catch small details; in others she’s very far away to catch an overall flavor. For instance, in “Taliesin Pond View,” Taliesin itself is barely visible at the top of a hill. Davis makes the viewer aware of just how well the house blends with its surroundings. It seems to be growing out of the hill like a natural rock ledge. Even the trees seem to orient themselves to the house, as if to suggest that Wright took into account the exact location and shape of each of the surrounding trees in his design.
“Taliesin Studio Window,” by contrast, brings the viewer in very close. It’s difficult to work out precisely what it is we’re seeing, but this is a part of the fascination, like being dropped into the middle of an Escher drawing. The bright red of what would appear to be the window frame leaps out at the viewer from the right side of the canvas. But it’s hard to even be certain if we’re viewing this from the outside or the inside. On the left side of the canvas is a stone path moving off at an unexpected angle and disappearing behind a wall, then a staircase, but it’s impossible to tell where it leads to.
Though she’s now had exhibits both at Taliesin in Wisconsin and here in Oak Park, Davis is still keeping busy painting additional Frank Lloyd Wrights. She recently completed a painting of the Home and Studio here in Oak Park and is now working on two paintings of the Robie House on the University of Chicago campus.
The paintings of Taliesin are currently available for viewing at Careful Peach Boutique at 11 Harrison St. in Oak Park. Gallery hours are noon-6 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday, and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. Her artwork can also be viewed on her website at www.davisartist.com.
Contact: poplawska@comcast.net