Photo Courtesy: Jerod Davies
A few weeks ago I was doing my usual Facebook trolling and a picture of a shiny new Pabst beer can graced my screen. I took a closer look at the photo and realized that a friend of mine had actually designed this killer piece of work now displayed on the side of SIX million cans worldwide.
Can I tell you I wasn’t surprised?
I met Jerod Alexander Davies three or four years ago at an event that paired Just-Us League, a freestyle art squad raising funds for charities that the artist founded, and local art collective and non-profit ArtLoveMagic together for a collective mural at the Hilton Anatole. I always have been impressed by his incredible artistic ability and his magnetism as he works live, bringing audience members in and making them like they were a part of the piece that was created.
“You quickly put up a silhouette and everyone’s like ‘Oh, it’s going to be a body!’ then you fill it in and it becomes something totally different,” Davies said. “You have to stage yourself so that it’s appealing as it morphs.
“I like to freak it out at the end. These people think they have you pegged and know what the piece will look like at the end, but you’ve gotta freak it out. I’ve had a couple of people over the years not like my freak out at the end.”
Live demo painting came from a need that Davies and his brothers Joshua and Isaac realized and soon filled. Someone would ask them if they could paint live at a party and they just ran with it. Now they’re what you’d call live demo experts after more than a decade of this kind of art entertainment.
I didn’t realize that I had only scratched the surface of his creative abilities until I sat down with him at his downtown Dallas home. Even Davies’ parents were artists, an interior designer/architect/upholsterer and portrait artist to be exact. Since childhood, his parents encouraged him and his brothers to express themselves creatively.
“I was born constantly challenged and inspired to create,” he said. “My dad would ask, ‘What do you need to make that, Jerod?’ and go get the paint that night. I grew up thinking anything is possible. Each of us has a different style but a universal style together.”
As he and his brothers grew up, the colorful trio grew artistically both individually and as one. Their expertise ranges from paintings to murals, sculpture, collages, 3D art, detailed body painted illustrations, live demo painting and installation art.
“I’m still exploring different facets of the gem I’m trying to polish”, said Davies of his artistic career. “Me being creative is just me being creative. I’m not confined to a two-word type of art. It’s my blessing and my curse, but I enjoy juggling my styles.”
Davies has even created an irreverent casual clothing line called Giant Nacho and has started working on a new menswear line called 4 AM that puts the Davies twist on classic pieces.
Davies thrives on the unexpected, the strange. He finds beauty in objects that most people pass by. I mean, the guy strapped a half-rotted cow skull onto the front of his four-wheeler after finding it in the woods and turned it into an art project. This kind of artistic hunger has come off as odd to certain people, but I find it fascinating.
“I took it home and bleached it, then meticulously geometrically fragmented the skull,” he said. “I saw it and thought to myself ‘Oh my God, I need this so bad.’ I have parts in my backyard like the spine that I’m going to turn into a glorious beautiful thing.”
Even after getting to know Jerod in the local art scene, seeing him out at events and even hiring him to paint a daycare for a client of mine, I didn’t know the full extent of his affair with the arts. He doesn’t just paint live or serve as emcee of a Dallas-based hip-hop graffiti crew, it’s so much more.
The 35-year-old artist calls himself “an environmental/color specialist” and has 16 years of commissioned experience under his belt. It’s clear that others have discovered his unbelievable potential, after learning that his work has been commissioned by big names like the City of Dallas, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dallas Mavericks, Erykah Badu and Modelo Especiale.
That’s right, the Davies brothers were even asked by Modelo to design custom pint glasses for the brand.
“They saw that we were bursting at the seams with ideas,” he said. There’s a lot of wheat and Fleur-de-Lis in the design. Nature is a common theme people can relate to. The ode to nature that I wrapped the stranger things in, like a light pole dripping ink, makes it widely acceptable.
“It was an alignment of the stars,” said Davies when asked of the Pabst PBArt win. “A friend mentioned the contest to me, I looked on the website and the contest had already ended. I went back to the website later that day and it said that the entries were extended until Monday at 5 p.m.”
Naturally, he whipped up the design in a matter of hours and turned it in within an hour of the contest ending. He was chosen as the winner of the design contest, out of more than 500 entries from every state in the U.S.
“He’s literally a living Pabst beer can come to life,” said Davies of the new can, which incorporates the brand’s logo into every aspect of the design. His illustration “Diving for Liquid Gold” currently is featured on cans worldwide and will grace six million 16-once tallboy cans over a three-month period. You can celebrate the local artist by popping open a can of PBR, now available anywhere tallboys are usually sold.
For more information on Jerod Davies visit his web site: here
