Bregelle Whitworth Davis | A Sustaining Power

Bregelle Whitworth Davis has held to her love of art through difficult times

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Two weeks before her first baby was due, after seven years of trying to conceive, Bregelle Whitworth Davis and her husband learned she had an advanced and aggressive form of breast cancer. Her doctors said she needed to begin treatment immediately. The next day labor was induced and her son was born; within a week Davis was undergoing intensive chemotherapy, followed by additional treatments and a series of medical complications.

She was so weak she couldn’t lift her infant for the first six months of his life, and neuropathy from the treatments meant she eventually had to retrain herself to paint. “Going through cancer took away much of my identity,” the 36-year-old artist says. “It took away my health, my hair, my ability to hold and care for my child. It even took away some of my ability to paint, but it never took away my desire to create.”

A recent painting, MOTHER’S DAY, celebrates Davis’ son’s 4th birthday. It also expresses the joy of giving birth to a second son after being told she could have no more children. Today she has been cancer-free for almost five years. “I never thought I’d have any kids, and now I have two sons,” she says with a smile. In the painting, under a dark sky, a doe and her two fawns are illuminated by sunflower-shaped halos or mandalas. Davis chose the sunflower because it reminded her of the design on the cover of an old book she was reading during her second pregnancy, adding even greater meaning to the piece.

Creativity and a deep love of animals have both been central to Davis since she was a child. Growing up in the small town of Sugar City, ID, she and her three siblings kept a “spoiled,” litter-box-trained rabbit named Smokey for 15 years, along with various cats, reptiles, and amphibians. Their mother also loved animals but said no to snakes; their father had everything from skunks to a monkey as a kid, but his father was allergic to dogs and cats. Today Davis and her husband, professional illustrator Tyler Davis, have a lovebird (a type of parrot) and three house rabbits that nestle under their feet in the extra bedroom that serves as a shared studio in their home in Sandy, UT, just south of Salt Lake City.

When Davis was a girl, her father worked as an electrician but at night sculpted wildlife, which was cast in bronze. (Now retired, Tim Whitworth is a full-time sculptor.) If she couldn’t sleep, Bregelle would go downstairs and sit beside him as he worked. The shortest route to the foundry he used in Cody, WY, went through Yellowstone National Park, so the family frequently spent time there, her father photographing its animals. “I thought it was normal that everyone saw bears and bison,” she recalls. As kids, she and her sister and two brothers would complain about having to go to Yellowstone again, but now the park is among her favorite destinations for artistic inspiration.

In Jackson, WY, where her father’s art was in the annual Fall Arts Festival and represented by a gallery, Davis played with the gallery owner’s children and later began to appreciate the art. “Art was always around us, so I wasn’t intimidated by it. I respected it and was able to realize it can be for everyone,” she says. She also came to understand that everyone’s taste is individual. “You just love what you love and what sparks joy in you,” she adds.

Although she didn’t begin seriously drawing and painting until high school, as a child her hands were always busy—knitting, crocheting, doing needlepoint, and sewing clothes for her animals and dolls. Later her creative expression included beaded jewelry and handmade books. She still does hand-quilting and makes sketchbooks for her husband.

At Brigham Young University-Idaho, Davis decided to study illustration even though her eventual goal was fine art. The school’s fine-art program had a focus on oils, to which she is allergic, and it leaned toward rendering the landscape and human figure, while her favored subject is animals. The illustration courses, on the other hand, gave her foundational drawing skills, challenged her to work quickly, and taught her to be receptive to clients’ needs—all skills that have served her well in her art career.

When she began painting, naturally gravitating to wildlife imagery, Davis took the ideas in Andy Warhol’s pop art and turned them on their head, creating a silk-screened effect that incorporated crisp lines, blocks of color, and negative space, but in artworks that were hand-painted and one of a kind. She also loved the graceful, lyrical styles of art nouveau and art deco, especially by Alphonse Mucha and Gustav Klimt. Thinking of the beautifully embellished quality of some of these works, she began exploring the use of metal leaf. Initially it wasn’t easy finding information on the technique; artists tend to keep trade secrets, and she was using acrylics rather than the more common oils.

Eventually she discovered what works for her. Applying the metal leaf first, she then glazes over it in layers of paint. Because real gold or silver leaf would be destroyed by that process, Davis employs imitation leaf on portions of the image where she plans to add paint, generally in the background. For extra brilliance in certain areas, she applies genuine 23-karat gold, not painting over it. The halos in MOTHER’S DAY were inspired by imagery of medieval saints and the holy family. In this case, the artist says, the glowing auras suggest the sacredness of motherhood and family in humans and all of nature.

Fascinated by the history of the Victorian era, Davis often listens to Victorian mystery novels while she works. Part of the culture at that time was something called the language of flowers, a coded form of communication using flowers and floral arrangements to symbolize ideas or feelings. Thinking about this, Davis included poppies in her piece titled STARGAZER. As a child she loved playing with seed-filled dried poppy pods in her great-grandmother’s garden. “It’s a spiritual connection with my great-grandmother,” she says. “Her memory lives on when I see poppies.”

In the painting, a small burrowing owl looks up at an enormous, Mucha-inspired moon and halo of stars. The image elicits a question for the artist: “Why do we look up at stars?” Perhaps for a sense of connection with loved ones who have gone on, or perhaps for inspiration, she says. She textured the night sky with silver leaf, the moon with gold leaf, and painted over both with a blue glaze.

In this and all her works, an intentionally limited color palette creates a self-imposed challenge: Without the benefit of multiple hues for shading, how can she produce a sense of three dimensions, a rendering of shadows and light? “With four colors it’s easy, but with three colors it’s more difficult. It forces me to think more about the work,” she says.

Yet even in a semi-abstracted style and combining animals and plants that may never be found together in nature, it is important for Davis that anatomy, size, proportions, and perspective read true. For this she relies on her own photographs—of wildlife in Yellowstone and elsewhere, and the burrowing owl at a local zoo.

Through the countless medical, physical, and emotional challenges, new motherhood, and painstakingly retraining her hands to create, Davis says she called on qualities she gained from her parents: “You work hard, you don’t give up.” The experience, while difficult, left her and her husband with a new and valuable perspective. “You’ve still got to be happy, move forward, and do what you love to do,” she says. “I have to do my art, because that’s what feels like me.”

representation
Paderewski Fine Art, Beaver Creek, CO; www.artbybregelle.com.

This story appeared in the June/July 2022 issue of Southwest Art magazine.