About

Intro

Jon Davenport spent twenty years working in advertising, on both sides of the Atlantic. Knowing how images are built to control and persuade became the subject of his art. There’s a double nostalgia in what he does — for the golden age of American imagery, and for the lost craft of print advertising itself, before everything went digital. He deconstructs that world, adds static and noise and lets the cracks show.

Bio

Born in 1972 in Ipswich, UK, Jon Davenport now lives and works in Charleston, SC. His career began in the pre-press department of Archant Ltd in Ipswich before moving into advertising. In 1999 he founded Round Window Ltd in London, an international design consultancy with clients including Nike and Virgin, which he ran as Creative Director until 2004. Since then he has worked as an artist, illustrator and freelance creative across the UK and USA. He holds a BSc in Biology from Brunel University, London.

Press

2022 Boston Globe Magazine

2020 Podcast with Mari Robeson

2016 Provincetown Magazine – The Art of the American Dream

2016 Creative Thresholds – Davenport Makes A Splash In The South

2015 Artsy Forager – He Said She Said

2015 Artsy Forager – Jon Davenport

2014 The Atlantan Magazine

Influences

Jon spent years in advertising so he knows how it works, how an image is designed to grab you, tell you what to think, make you want something. The great 1950s illustrators like Gil Elvgren and Alberto Vargas were masters of that. Warhol understood it too. But what really interests him is taking that polished, controlled imagery and weathering it, adding static and noise, stripping the gloss back until the cracks show. It stops selling you something and starts saying something.

Process

Advertising spends a lot of energy pulling things together, crafting a single polished message designed to get inside your head. Jon does the opposite. Taking that imagery apart, layer by layer, until something more honest comes out the other side.

Every painting starts in the mess, the accidental, the unplanned. He collages fragments of vintage magazines, mid-century advertising, and ephemera collected over years of travel, transferring them onto panel board with gel medium, layering them with washes, drips, and strokes of paint. Once dry, another pour of gel medium goes over the whole surface, melting everything together beneath it. Then more paint, some areas pushed forward, others buried. Finally a coat of polyurethane to lock it all in and bring the color back to life. A large work like a 48×48 takes several weeks, most of that time spent waiting for layers to cure and working out what to leave alone. The accidents are the point.