Reflections on David Driskell's Life and Career

A Letter from Jessica May

April 1, 2020

We learned this evening that David Clyde Driskell has passed away. His nephew Rodney Moore shared that David died at a hospital near his home in Maryland. This news is just settling in as I sit down to write about David, and I have an image in my mind’s eye of artists, collectors, students, curators, and sensitive souls—beloved friends on every continent—weeping as they learn the news. The pain of this loss is so keen that the normal words of soothing comfort feel totally out of place. Words in general seem out of place in the shadow of such tremendous loss, but they are also the only way I can see to acknowledge his vital and enduring presence in my own life, and in the life of this community—despite the sudden and profound sadness of his death.

David Driskell. Photo by Jack Montgomery

We in Maine had a special relationship to David, and we treasured his presence, as I believe he treasured the state and his community here. David first came to Maine as a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 1953. He was a painting student at Howard University, recently married and a new father. He had a scholarship for a summer course of study, so he came to this special place—a state he associated with the entire glorious tradition of American painting—and recognized immediately that Maine would have a profound effect on him. Within a decade, the Driskells purchased a home in Falmouth and began spending their long academic summers here, planting roots in the state both literally and figuratively (David was a fantastic and celebrated gardener). I believe that David had a sense from that very first summer in Maine of how important the state would be to him and his family, but I’m not sure when exactly he realized just how important he would become to the artistic community in Maine.

I learned so much from David. I think we all did. I learned facts, of course, about art history and about art itself as a means of thinking about the world; of framing perspective; of generating complexity, emotion, and aesthetic pleasure. But I learned something about how to learn from David, as well, and I am sure I’m not alone: somehow David’s sheer graciousness conveyed his gentle, generous intelligence. He prompted us to think differently and in a slightly more open way.

My best example of this quality is one I will remember throughout my own life: Last summer I spent a fair amount of time with David, as we worked together both on the museum’s acquisition of his great painting, Ghetto Wall #2 (1970), but also on exhibition planning for his 2021 retrospective. He spent time with me thinking about Ghetto Wall #2, which was painted just one year before his great Pine and Moon, which is also in the PMA collection. I was transfixed by the profound difference between the two paintings, one “political,” rooted in the Civil Rights Movement, and the other much more spiritual, more rooted in a landscape tradition. David observed my interest—which was about categories rather than meaning, a classic art historical dodge—with patient bemusement, but he had his eye on bigger and much more complex questions.

David’s reflections on Ghetto Wall #2 over the course of the summer revealed his willingness to think about that painting as a mystery—not in the prosaic sense, but as a philosophical question—even to himself. Instead of explaining exactly what he was up to, making the history of his own art neat and tidy, David modeled a kind of openness, a willingness to ask the question, “How can one respond meaningfully and authentically to their historical moment?” David saw Pine and Moon and Ghetto Wall #2 as two paintings that proposed alternate answers to the fundamental question of how to be present in the world.

In my life and career, I have known very few people who thought more deeply and showed more conviction about how to be present in the world. Very few of us will wield the kind of influence and authority that David had earned in his years as one of the nations’ preeminent artists, art historians, educators, and curators. And yet, even among that small group of true leaders, very few will come to each of these roles with such an easy, confident grace. That grace was the David’s great gift: his willingness to model dignity, humility, and thoughtfulness in his every interaction—to model that grace so persuasively that others took the hint and found our better, kinder, more thoughtful selves.

We know that he influenced us deeply in his long and extraordinary life, and in his glorious presence in Maine. In each of the communities that David called home, and there were many, his presence was similarly, positively influential. We can only have faith that he influenced us enough to carry us through this time of mourning: for David, for the sheer force of will that has been extinguished, and for the tide of grief we observe in so many corners of our world at this unthinkable, awful moment.

On several occasions I heard David recite the line from Psalm 30, “Joy comes with the morning.” Joy will indeed come again, and I’ll remember that David predicted it. But not this morning. Not for a while yet.

Jessica May with David Driskell