photo: Margot Hartford

Here's what I'm after: the lived-in, wavering line. The off-balance composition. Emotional truth over polish.

Rachel Davis is a fine artist creating intimate figurative work and layered botanical abstractions from her studio at ICB ART in Sausalito, California. Her practice is shaped by nearly thirty years of Sogetsu ikebana and three decades as a psychologist, two ways of paying close attention to what’s beneath the surface.

BIO | CV

Artist Statement

I find beauty hiding in plain sight: the asymmetry of a fallen branch, the crack in a vase, the weathered skin on a time-worn face.

Nearly thirty years of Sogetsu ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) changed how and where I look. Away from the centered full bloom, toward the bud about to open, the leaf about to fall, the space between branches. I paint with the same eye, in layers, with room to breathe.

Imperfection drew me to ikebana. It also drew me to faces.

I was a cross-eyed, funny-looking kid with a drop-dead gorgeous mom. Her attunement to beauty ran deep, binding us in ways both tender and fraught. And funny-looking, it turns out, is more interesting than pretty ever was. More beautiful, too.

Here’s what I’m after. The lived-in, wavering line. The off-balance composition. Emotional truth over polish.

Drawing runs through all of it. The hand thinking faster than the mind can edit.