La Loma is pleased to present Self-Portrait Looking at the Sunrise, new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Gerald Davis. The exhibition brings together a year's worth of self-portraits alongside three seascapes, works that share a single preoccupation with light.

 Gerald Davis came to the self-portrait as a practical choice: he is always available to pose, comfortable with solitude, and unburdened by the anxiety of getting a likeness wrong. What the paintings record are shifts in mood across seasons, the honest accounting of a face over time. Three of the darkest canvases were made in winter. Two reclining full-length figures extend the project into the body—languid, unbothered, a slightly ironized evocation of an L.A. slacker (the paintings themselves don’t slack, of course). One portrait is in explicit dialogue with a late Rembrandt, whose unflinching self-scrutiny across decades Davis admires.

Brushwork is, for Davis, where a painting becomes personal, the irreducible fingerprint of how a particular hand moves. The seascapes, painted at Huntington Beach, the coast of Spain, and a perfect dawn wave at Jalama State Beach (Davis divides his time between the studio and the sea), carry the same mark. The Spanish sunset borrows its color from Monet's Impression, Sunrise. Together, the portraits and seascapes form a continuous gaze: one turned inward, one turned toward the horizon. Both look at the same light.