An Artist's Life: 50 Years of Self-Portraits

Through 27 vivid self-portraits, An Artist’s Life reveals the personal and creative evolution of Carlton Davis—a story spanning five decades of artistic practice, recovery, and identity.

The book follows Davis from early success in architecture to battles with crack addiction, a bipolar diagnosis, and the discovery of Carlotta, a gender-fluid persona. With reflection and raw honesty, he documents both chaos and clarity through visual storytelling.

Davis studied at Yale and the Bartlett School of Architecture. He taught at UCLA and curated the drive-by Art Dock gallery in LA. His drawings and sculptures have been featured in global exhibits and major publications including People Magazine and Tremor Talk.

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What is your next project?

I plan to write Las Vegas Then and Now, which is an idea I have been working on for the last 20 years.  Las Vegas, so unique, has a real history and has transformed itself frequently. The city started out as a train stop, then became a driving destination, and eventually became an air hub, too. Each added mode of transportation has changed the city in concept and form.

What genre do you write and why?

All my work has some element of memoir.

What is the last great book you’ve read?

I was glad to read Louis Menand’s insightful The Free World – Art and Thought in the Cold War.  The section on George Kennan about the Soviet Command Economy was particularly interesting to me, as were the sections on artists Robert Rauschenberg and Josef Albers and their work at Black Mountain College.

What is a favorite compliment you have received on your writing?

I have been termed “fearless,” with which I agree.  It has liberated me.

What were the biggest rewards and challenges with writing your book?

This is my third book, all of which are memoirs, but each in its own way.  The benefit and the challenge are that this is cathartic.  ‘Bipolar Bare’ is my memoir about my mental illness.  The Art Dockuments is my memoir about a place and my deep connection with Downtown Los Angeles in the Art District.  And An Artist’s Life is my memoir about my long quest to be a true artist.

What is one piece of advice you would give to an aspiring author?

Persist!

Which authors inspired you to write?

Oh, so many, including but not limited to Raymond Chandler, for his ability to create a Noir picture of Los Angeles; E.E. Cumming, for his depiction of being an American in World War I; and V.S. Naipaul, for his portrayal of the West Indies and India.

What is something you had to cut from your book that you wish you could have kept?

I had written a piece comparing two images found at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Peter Paul Rubens and his painting of Prometheus bound to Mt. Caucasus with an eagle perpetually feeding on his liver; and  Marcel Duchamp’s “Glass with the Bride Stripped Bare to the Shoulders Even.”

On rituals:

Where do you write?

I write in my basement-level walkout studio with its great views of the woods around me and the Rose Bowl Stadium about half a mile north.

Do you write every day?  What is your writing schedule?

No – when I am not writing, I am making art, which is so consuming, too.  It’s challenging to break away from one to pursue the other.  I don’t need to invent my story, just to tell it.  I go to my studio and write from 10 a.m. to as late as 7 p.m. on many days.

But no two days are ever the same.  So I make art, I write, and I am still interested in architecture.  I’m still a licensed architect in California. I am a reader, too, and some days I read in the morning.  Other days, especially now that I am older, I go for physical therapy, voice therapy, and other exercise.

Is there a specific ritualistic thing you do during your writing time?

I sharpen pencils!

In today’s tech savvy world, most writers use a computer or laptop. Have you ever written parts of your book on paper?

Yes, I wrote by hand in my journals for many years.  Now I am having problems with Essential Tremor, and I can no longer write clearly by hand, so I rely on my computer.

Fun stuff:

If you could go back in time, where would you go?

I would gladly return to the American West of the 1830s, when George Catlin was painting the Rocky Mountains and giving the world a look at this frontier.

Favorite travel spot?

London; Paris; Greece.  I love the light in Greece, the life in Paris, and the multiple towns that make up London, which resembles how Los Angeles comes together.

What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done?

I pulled a woman from a wrecked car with an active gas leak before it could explode. 

Any hobbies? or Name a quirky thing you like to do.

I have a large collection of miniature buildings that I have collected over my travels.

If there is one thing you want readers to remember about you, what would it be?

I never give up.  Despite dyslexia, difficulties with numbers, math, right/left, all of which bring me moments of extreme frustration, I persist.

What is your favorite holiday?

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, because it is a great way to get together with friends and to make new friends, as we do at our house.

What is something that made you laugh recently?

Right now I am looking at my wife’s funny new glasses.

Tell us about your longest friendship.

My friend Jim and I go back to 1962 at Yale, when we were college freshmen.  We loved to go into New York City and visit art museums.  We still talk every few days.

What is the strangest way you've become friends with someone?

I first met my close friend Gary in 1978 when he kicked me out of his office because my arrival interrupted his long spiel to two of his students on contemporary art in Los Angeles.

Who was your childhood celebrity crush?

Myrna Loy, and when I was older Marilyn Monroe and Janis Joplin. 

 On the 11th day of a September morning, in the second year of the 21st century, the American dream ended. The sun had risen in Los Angeles, and I was preparing breakfast when Ginger yelled from upstairs, "Turn on the TV! A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York!" I watched fires explode from both 110-story structures, releasing a dense cloud of black smoke into the bright blue autumn sky. I had worked on the design of 'Windows on the World," a restaurant with a panoramic view of Manhattan atop one of the towers, and I saw it pancake down and disappear from the skyline. I gasped as human bodies tumbled down the walls of the towers.

Incredulous commentators described the ensuing calamity. Remote airborne video cameras showed the dark gray cloud rising and spreading across the city and captured the towers' floors dropping on top of each other and disappearing into the enormous cloud of debris engulfing the lower portion of the island of Manhattan, known as the Battery for a 17th century fortress the English built there. Mobile cameras broadcast haunting images of men, women, bystanders, and witnesses to the tragedy making their way through the ground smog in their workday suits and dresses that would become dusted with gruesome gray flecks of falling particles. Their open mouths exposed their teeth as they gasped for air, fleeing from what must have seemed the wrath of God. I had left the bacon sizzling in the pan when Ginger had shouted news of the catastrophe, and now our kitchen was filled with acrid smoke.

We threw open the windows of our 19th century house 3000 miles from the scene of the tragedy and rushed back to the screen. We were two architects hypnotized by the destruction of the tallest buildings in the world, filled with ordinary humans doing business at the dawn of a new millennium. Little did we know we were witnessing a challenge to the way we lived and the role we played in the world.

My attention was riveted upon the people who jumped, were pushed, or fell from the upper floors of the towers when no other escape was possible and the smoke and fire were too much to bear. I had experienced "suicidal ideation" since I was six years old, and had attempted suicide with alcohol and aspirin when I was a junior in college. Launching yourself into the heavens 1000 or more feet above the sidewalk when the only alternatives were suffocation and immolation, seemed to me a liberating alternative, but I realize that many people observe religious and ethical structures about taking one's life. Rather than share these moody thoughts with Ginger, I opened a volume of Francis Bacon's paintings. One of the highlights of my first trip to Europe was encountering his "Self-Portrait, 1971" at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. I felt as if I had been drinking absinthe, "or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past, and Lethewards had sunk," as Keats phrased it in 'Ode to a Nightingale.'I knew that I was moving towards self-inflicted oblivion when I drew over a rough sketch I made in my daily diary of September 12, 2000. The sketch was scribbled over notes from my humdrum career as an architect upon which I spilled water of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, on the page.  How symbolic! In the year preceding the twin towers collapse, I witnessed my own disintegration. I was expiring in the addictive haze of crack cocaine. My body was falling apart, my breathing was labored, and my joints were painfully stiff. After a hit, I would gag and vomit gray bile. Yet I was still semi-functional. I did not perform as I would have if I were well, but I could hold down a job.