Jeremy Okai Davis

The Art of Practice

Written by Armin Tolentino; Photographed by Laura Dart

There’s a memory from Jeremy Okai Davis’s childhood that still echoes within him: his uncle, the late Walter Davis, an NBA All-Star, was visiting family back in North Carolina, shooting hoops with his young nephew. Jeremy missed a shot and it was time to head inside, but Walter dropped a piece of wisdom that Jeremy would never let go of: “You can’t walk away on a missed shot.”

Basketball was a central part of the Davis household, and for much of his youth, one of Jeremy’s deepest passions, along with art. He’s since channeled his energies from basketball to painting, but he’s applied everything he learned from the court to the canvas.

The Practice

Growing up in Charlotte, Davis’s life as an athlete and an artist were always two distinct worlds; but within, the two passions fed each other. He developed a work ethic in the gym that drives his artistic determination today. His studio is a Tuff Shed in his backyard; the proximity to his house, maybe twelve steps door to door, can be a challenge. How do you motivate yourself to show up and work, when you might not have ideas, when you might be bored, when the living room couch sounds much more welcoming than the Tuff Shed at night?

Davis talks about artistic preparation like an elite athlete. He quotes his uncle’s advice and tries every day to “make the shot in the studio.” Through sixteen years of constant practice since moving to Portland, he’s developed an idiosyncratic style of portraiture, in the vein of pointillism, where each brushstroke of color retains its distinct independence instead of melting into homogeny. Step back, and the subject’s face blends into gorgeous coherence. Step closer, and the viewer sees the many pebbles of hues that materialize when we pay attention at this more intimate proximity. With only a few colors, Davis is able to recreate the entire spectrum of human skin tone, but also peppers in pops of green and blue and hot pink, which help bring out, he says, “the eccentricities of people.”

It’s all about showing up: “Just getting in the studio, trying things and playing around. You’re flexing a muscle. Trying to see how it feels. That’s the workout.”

The Game

If basketball and painting have in common a necessary commitment to practice, the ultimate performance for an athlete and an artist look very different. Success in sports is so measurable…there’s literally a score. How does Davis, after all that exertion and the late nights in the studio, know whether his work, ultimately, was successful?

Engagement, he tells me. Jeremy’s game day is now the opening night of his exhibitions. And while his work has been displayed at dozens of prestigious locations, including the Portland Art Museum, the Washington Convention Center, and the Multnomah Courthouse, he doesn’t measure success by the number of people who show up. It’s not enough for his paintings to be simply attractive. He expects the portraits to inspire conversations, spark curiosity, and sow new knowledge, especially for viewers outside of the fine arts world. The son of two educators, perhaps it’s no surprise that Davis’s mission as an artist has evolved in this direction: through the still medium of portraiture, he seeks to reanimate the vibrant histories and accomplishments of Black athletes, leaders, culture bearers, and trailblazers.

In 2018, the Port of Portland displayed an exhibition of Jeremy’s work along Concourse A of the Portland International Airport. Some traveling parents were so compelled by his work, they reached out to him. “Your painting stopped my daughter in her tracks,” they said. “Here’s what it meant to her.” These moments of engagement are precious to Davis. That a child, in the frenzy of an airport between gate and baggage claim, could be so taken by works of art. That her family paused and listened to what she and the paintings were trying to share. That they were moved to share with him in turn. Fittingly, this exhibit was called More Education, fourteen pieces that reflect Davis’s childhood influences and loved ones: a painting of his father holding his infant brother, with the words COACH emblazoned in block letters beneath; the cover of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

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More recently, in 2022, Davis unveiled A Good Sport, portraits of African American athletes and public figures, many lost in our collective memory due to the pervasive racism these barrier-breakers experienced during their careers. Revisiting their accomplishments invites us to wonder at their wellspring of resilience, the thick skin these figures had to cultivate in order to succeed. I asked him about the impetus for telling their stories. “Part of me feels a responsibility to do it,” he says. “It feels like if I didn’t insert my people’s history into the work I’d be kind of doing a disservice.” But it’s far from an obligation for Davis; he finds it exciting to uncover and bring these histories back into our consciousness. “I genuinely enjoy the educational aspects of it and not even for the service to the community necessarily. It ends up being that—but a lot of it is for me.”

The Offseason

With all the effort he expends—the research, the hours he devotes in deep study of his subjects over the four to six months it takes to create work for a new exhibition—how does Davis maintain the motivation to start from a blank canvas again and imagine what’s next, for his work and for himself as an artist?

Davis draws a comparison to the basketball offseason. Truly great ball players don’t fritter away the three months between seasons. They use that time to add a new move to their repertoire that will elevate their game. The artist Davis, like the athlete Davis, attacks every offseason with this same vision: “The main thing I’ve tried to do over the course of my career is to test just how far I can push the paint.” Push the paint to capture forgotten stories. Push the paint to extract curiosity and clarity through thousands of brushstrokes, individual in perception, but collective in purpose. And, most critically, to push himself, to test what his abilities and his imagination can manifest with the raw materials in his care.

Rather than wait for opportunities, Davis makes things happen—a skill honed from his earliest days in Portland in 2007, when he and other emerging artists banded together and embraced the DIY ethos. Through their collective resourcefulness and ingenuity, they created art shows, serving as each other’s promoters and gallerists. Though it can feel terrifying, his advice to the new crop of artists he has mentored at Pacific Northwest College of Art and Lewis & Clark College is beautiful in its simplicity: “You make the work and you show the work, even if it’s not your finest. You get better. Just put it on the wall.”

In this way, Jeremy Okai Davis continues to honor his uncle’s advice from those many years ago. If we get comfortable with the missed shot, if we get comfortable with complacency, we never learn. We never discover what is possible. What the paint can do. What we can do when we dare to show the world what we’ve made and, in turn, what has made us.

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The Art of Practice

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