STAN DAVIS

About this artist

Stan Davis, born in 1942, with extensive experience in advertising agencies, is an illustrator in oil of 19th-century Blackfoot, Sioux and Cheyenne Indians. In an attempt to ensure historical and cultural accuracy, Davis makes every costume used in his paintings.

Raised near Tallahassee, Florida, he searched the beaches, as a child, for pre-Colombian arrowheads and pottery shards. He graduated from the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida. Davis joined the Air Force after working for a year for an advertising agency in Coco Beach, Florida. After his discharge in 1968, he moved to Los Angeles, where he became art director for a large advertising agency. He started his own agency in the mid-1970’s, though he continued to draw and paint in his spare time.

In 1979, he decided to paint Native American-themed art after a trip to art galleries in Scottsdale, Arizona. Back in Los Angeles, he studied Western movies as a starting point for subject matter, but soon realized that Hollywood was historically inaccurate. Davis then visited a shop specializing in Native American costumes for movie studios, where he learned to make historically accurate replicas of tribal clothing.

Davis visited museums, studying artifacts and artwork of the Blackfoot tribe, traveling in the American Northwest and Canada to gain perspective on the Northern Plains’ Indians. Back in Los Angeles, he hired Native American actors as models and began to paint while continuing to work full-time at his advertising agency. Two years later, he took his twenty-five best paintings and successfully entered the gallery world. He eventually left the advertising business and returned to his native Florida, where he continues to live and paint.