In Painting for My Dad (2011), artist Noah Davis presents a male figure gazing over a rocky landscape beneath a star-strewn, nearly black night sky. With the figure facing away from the viewer, dressed in a worn red shirt and denim trousers and holding a lantern that offers little illumination, the artwork is solemn. Davis created it in the year his father, Keven, died from a brain tumor.
“It’s very unclear whether we are looking at the back of [Davis] or the back of his father,” notes Eleanor Nairne, head of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Davis had become a parent himself two years prior, “so there’s a chilling poignancy to it,” she adds.