Second Career
A Portrait of the Artist as a Former Surgeon
In retirement, Jay Davenport has exchanged scalpel and scrubs for paintbrush and canvas.
by Kate Ledger

For Jay Davenport, becoming a doctor came down to a decision between two life paths. Living in New York City in the late 1950s and fulfilling his military duty by working with the public health service there, he was thinking about becoming a physician. But surrounded by the energy of the Beat Generation and enthralled by great museums and the creative culture of the Village, he also was drawn to the idea of becoming an artist.

Eventually, getting into medical school at the University of Kansas nudged him toward medicine, and Davenport became an orthopedic surgeon, serving two communities on Minnesota's Iron Range for 30 years. But despite the rigors of his career, he didn't turn his back on the impulse to create. "Art has always been part of my experience," Davenport says. Now 71 and retired from medicine, he's honoring that impulse full time, pursuing it with an intensity that's nothing like a hobby. For Davenport the artist, it's a second chance.

Stories Behind the Images
The Davenport Art Studio-a workspace and gallery-is a barn-shaped building 70 feet behind the Davenport home. Both buildings are tucked in the woods off a narrow, gravel road in rural Mountain Iron, Minnesota, about 12 miles west of Virginia. The nearest neighbors are three-quarters of a mile away, Davenport built the studio after retiring from private practice in 1997. When the structure took shape, even his three grown children were impressed. "We did wonder a little bit what Dad was up to," acknowledges his son Ryan, who lives in Minneapolis and works in media relations for Fairview Health Services.

But step into the gallery and the works hanging on the walls reveal at once Davenport's persevering vision. In addition to several naturalistic landscapes of Minnesota is an array of larger-than-life, vibrant watercolor portraits of Native Americans. His current show, "Born in America," is based on archival photographs, such as those taken by Edward S. Curtis, who traveled around the country taking pictures of tribes in the late 1800s. Davenport's painting technique is inspired by the spare portraiture style of 19th century painter John Singer Sargent, but the faces he has conjured are perhaps more pensive than the ones in the original photographs. "I let my thoughts create a personality for the person in the portrait," he explains.

Davenport began work on this particular body of work 10 years ago, when he stumbled across a wedding portrait of his great-grandmother, born in 1845, whom he'd heard through family lore was a Cherokee from Tennessee. "I grew up feeling a connection to Native American culture," he says. He did a series of sketches of her, and from then, painted her portrait in watercolor. (Of her face, he says: "There's a sadness there.") The experience set him on a journey, along which he created 19 pieces of similarly styled work, including three studies of Sitting Bull and portraits of several Navajo subjects. "I wanted to make the viewer feel a sense of respect and also a little intimidated, like you're encroaching upon their circumstances."

Learning by Doing
Davenport developed his technique by reading, talking to other artists, and spending hours experimenting. His "formal" training in art began during medical school when he learned woodcutting and printmaking from a fellow physician-in-training, Mike 'Carmichael, a radiologist, who eventually lived and practiced in Duluth. The two friends continued making woodcuts, some impressively large, others with details so fine they had to be made with the blade of a scalpel, until Carmichael died of cancer in 1975. Shortly after, Davenport began casting about for a new medium and chose watercolor. Since then, he's trained himself through sheer practice, seeking knowledgeable help when he can find it.

"In a sense, he's like a little kid," observes Rollin Alm, a Meadowlands, Minnesota, artist who runs The Learning Room, a nonprofit that offers instruction in painting and drawing. Alm. visited Davenport's studio recently to check out the former surgeons work and offer encouragement."[Jay] asks questions and soaks up information like a sponge."

In fact, it's his desire to learn-and his dogged ability to venture ahead with the information he's picked up-that ties Davenport's second career most closely to his first. After training in Kansas, and completing a residency at St. Luke's Hospital in the well-known Dickson-Dively Orthopedics Group in Kansas City, Davenport and his. wife Martha, a nurse, sought a small community in which to live and practice. With their young children, they moved to the Iron Range in 1970. For more than a decade, Davenport was the sole orthopedic surgeon in a 14-physician clinic in the town of Virginia. In his very first week on the job, he was put to the test after a man was hit by a train. In the OR, working with a general surgeon, Davenport stabilized bone after bone, for 14 straight hours. "In medical school, you get four years of formal training, but you learn everything once you're out," he says. "Eventually every physician has to be self-taught."

When he decided to part from the group in 1983, he established a private practice in Virginia and, a few years later, opened another office in Hibbing, 25 miles away. On call every other night, working 12-hour days, he kept up with advances in the field through journals, trips to conferences, and discussions with other surgeons in the community. "Often," he reflects on his career, "1 was operating on people who were desperately injured ... busted to pieces ... and my job was solving problems as they came up."

Producing three to four paintings a year while he was practicing medicine and a large body of sketches and watercolors since retirement, he now has a sizable collection. "He's an accomplished artist," Alm says.

Today, Davenport spends an average of eight hours a day working on art. "Either I'm painting or I'm reading about art or I'm walking in the woods looking for subjects or I'm framing paintings," he says. The pieces in his studio range in price from $100 for the smallest of the woodcut prints to $2,000, for a watercolor portrait.

He acknowledges chat he doesn't get much traffic through the studio. But he has• been the subject of articles in area papers, including the Hibbing Daily tribune and the Mesabi Daily News, and radio interviews. His work has even traveled out of state: Eight of his paintings hung in a gallery in Grcat Bend, Kansas, and three showed in Bisbee, Arizona. Recently,, three businessmen who stopped into the studio commissioned him to paint their portrait for their office. Davenport earned $3,000 for the work. How long did it take him to paint it? Davenport chuckles and gives an artist's answer: "All my life."