Visual Voices Journal

An Artist’s Life by Carlton Davis presents a chronicle of 50 years of artistic self-examination through 27 self-portraits. Designed as both a memoir and visual archive, the book explores the intersections of mental illness, creativity, and identity through Davis’s lens as an artist, architect, and writer.

The narrative spans decades of highs and lows—from working in acclaimed architecture firms to struggling with bipolar disorder, addiction, and questions of gender identity. The introduction of Carlotta, Davis’s female alter ego, adds an additional layer to the exploration of self. Each chapter uses a portrait as its starting point, capturing not only Davis’s personal transformation but the broader shifts in cultural and artistic landscapes. His story, co-authored with Peter Lownds, is told with detail, structure, and attention to the relationship between image and text.

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About the Author

Davis holds degrees from Yale University and the Bartlett School of Architecture and spent decades working at the intersection of art, writing, and architecture. His essays have appeared in LA Architect, Coagula Art Journal, and Tremor Talk. Davis’s past books include The Art Dockuments and Bipolar Bare, the latter recognized with the Eric Hoffer Award. Through partnerships with literary outlets and supporters of creative nonfiction like AME, An Artist’s Life is reaching new audiences.

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Excerpt

On the 11th day of a September morning, in the second year of the 21st century, the American dream ended. The sun had risen in Los Angeles, and I was preparing breakfast when Ginger yelled from upstairs, “Turn on the TV! A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York!” I watched fires explode from both 110-story structures, releasing a dense cloud of black smoke into the bright blue autumn sky. I had worked on the design of ‘Windows on the World,” a restaurant with a panoramic view of Manhattan atop one of the towers, and I saw it pancake down and disappear from the skyline. I gasped as human bodies tumbled down the walls of the towers.

Incredulous commentators described the ensuing calamity. Remote airborne video cameras showed the dark gray cloud rising and spreading across the city and captured the towers’ floors dropping on top of each other and disappearing into the enormous cloud of debris engulfing the lower portion of the island of Manhattan, known as the Battery for a 17th century fortress the English built there. Mobile cameras broadcast haunting images of men, women, bystanders, and witnesses to the tragedy making their way through the ground smog in their workday suits and dresses that would become dusted with gruesome gray flecks of falling particles. Their open mouths exposed their teeth as they gasped for air, fleeing from what must have seemed the wrath of God. I had left the bacon sizzling in the pan when Ginger had shouted news of the catastrophe, and now our kitchen was filled with acrid smoke.

We threw open the windows of our 19th century house 3000 miles from the scene of the tragedy and rushed back to the screen. We were two architects hypnotized by the destruction of the tallest buildings in the world, filled with ordinary humans doing business at the dawn of a new millennium. Little did we know we were witnessing a challenge to the way we lived and the role we played in the world.

My attention was riveted upon the people who jumped, were pushed, or fell from the upper floors of the towers when no other escape was possible and the smoke and fire were too much to bear. I had experienced “suicidal ideation” since I was six years old, and had attempted suicide with alcohol and aspirin when I was a junior in college. Launching yourself into the heavens 1000 or more feet above the sidewalk when the only alternatives were suffocation and immolation, seemed to me a liberating alternative, but I realize that many people observe religious and ethical structures about taking one’s life. Rather than share these moody thoughts with Ginger, I opened a volume of Francis Bacon’s paintings. One of the highlights of my first trip to Europe was encountering his “Self-Portrait, 1971” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. I felt as if I had been drinking absinthe, “or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past, and Lethewards had sunk,” as Keats phrased it in ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’

I knew that I was moving towards self-inflicted oblivion when I drew over a rough sketch I made in my daily diary of September 12, 2000. The sketch was scribbled over notes from my humdrum career as an architect upon which I spilled water of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, on the page.  How symbolic! In the year preceding the twin towers collapse, I witnessed my own disintegration. I was expiring in the addictive haze of crack cocaine. My body was falling apart, my breathing was labored, and my joints were painfully stiff. After a hit, I would gag and vomit gray bile. Yet I was still semi-functional. I did not perform as I would have if I were well, but I could hold down a job.

Fun Interview with Carlton

If you could go back in time, where would you go?

I would gladly return to the American West of the 1830s, when George Catlin was painting the Rocky Mountains and giving the world a look at this frontier.

Favorite travel spot?

London; Paris; Greece.  I love the light in Greece, the life in Paris, and the multiple towns that make up London, which resembles how Los Angeles comes together.

What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done?

I pulled a woman from a wrecked car with an active gas leak before it could explode.

Any hobbies? Or name a quirky thing you like to do.

I have a large collection of miniature buildings that I have collected over my travels.

If there is one thing you want readers to remember about you, what would it be?

I never give up.  Despite dyslexia, difficulties with numbers, math, right/left, all of which bring me moments of extreme frustration, I persist.

What is your favorite holiday?

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it is a great way to get together with friends and to make new friends, as we do at our house.

What is something that made you laugh recently?

Right now I am looking at my wife’s funny new glasses.

Tell us about your longest friendship.

My friend Jim and I go back to 1962 at Yale, when we were college freshmen.  We loved to go into New York City and visit art museums.  We still talk every few days.

What is the strangest way you’ve become friends with someone?

I first met my close friend Gary in 1978 when he kicked me out of his office because my arrival interrupted his long spiel to two of his students on contemporary art in Los Angeles