Artist Veronica Davila was a seventh grader living in Sweden when her father, a pulp and paper engineer, decided to move the family to America for a year. To a small town in Idaho, no less.
It was either going to be a disaster or an adventure. The latter is what comes through in Davila’s “Echoes” series on display at Anne Neilson Fine Art in SouthPark.
Davila, a mother of a graduating high schooler who makes her home in Matthews now, is a contemporary watercolorist known for her realism. In this series, she romanticizes the beauty in everyday life, particularly the sun-shining days of summer.
“We didn’t know if we were going to come back home or not, so we made the best of it,” Davila says. “We went to tractor pulls and rodeos, everything we could think of—a lot of road trips.”
She had been learning English in school. Her 9-year-old brother was not quite as lucky. But they survived and thrived, and after their family transferred to Toronto a year later, they eventually settled in Charlotte, visiting the day Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989.
Davila learned how to paint from her Swedish grandfather, who didn’t mind letting her get messy as a child, inviting her to join him in his basement studio.
She painted “Lost in Translation” from a series of slides, many of which her grandfather took while visiting them in Idaho. Her nostalgia shines through in the three-dimensional watercolor called “96 in the Shade.”
“The rental house we were in came with a pool,” she says. “As a seventh grader, that was the most amazing thing. I’m in the pink suit. The gal on the diving board is Randy, one of the first girls I met. She had a fantastic perm, so I went to J.C. Penny and also got a fantastic perm.”
The scene reminds her of the smell of chlorine, the rough touch of a cement pool and the intense sunshine of “every single day.”
In the work “Hell’s Canyon,” Davila captures the fun of swimming on the Snake River in what felt like the middle of nowhere. Painting the landscape, particularly the water, was one of her greatest challenges in the series, she says.
“I knew the water was going to be so hard,” Davila says. “I just had to prepare myself to break it down in sections, not look at the whole thing.”
In the painting “Coca Cola Roundup,” she captured her appreciation for all the “Americana” she took in at rodeos, cattle shows and local parades.
“It was so over the top, coming from where we came from,” she says. “That was the lifestyle we had seen on Dallas, Falcon Crest and other TV shows.”
ECHOES: Veronica Davila is currently on display at Anne Neilson Fine Art, 721 Governor Morrison Street, Suite 180