JMikal Davis: Patchworks & Boundaries

Hold Back the Night (The Trammps), 6 Story Mural commissioned by Park Albany, Albany, NY, 2017

By VICTOR SLEDGE July 4, 2024

Hellbent isn’t the moniker that may come to mind when you think of an artist who paints vibrant murals with fanciful patterns and lively colors. And that’s because the type of work artist JMikal Davis – also known as Hellbent – used to make. 

“I was doing street-based work until around 2001. Around 2005, I did my first mural,” Davis explains. 

Moving to New York in 1999, Davis’s work was so individual, but it was also often illegal. A lover of street art may not be able to deny the value and the inspiration artists get from that scene, but they also can’t deny the charges that can potentially come with it.  

“My daughter was born in 2012. And I definitely chilled out when my wife was pregnant,” Davis jokes. 

That timeline worked out because since then, Davis has worked with brands like Ralph Lauren and Coach and has gone from his work having to be done in secret to being paid to paint multistory buildings across the country.  

Yet, his style and the spirit behind the early street work he did still remains. 

In a world where public spaces are becoming filled with clean lines, muted and earth-toned colors and all around minimalistic aesthetics, Davis makes grand pieces that seem to dance to their own music in any given community. 

He’s mindful that day-to-day life can be drab at times, to say the least. And there’s plenty of art that speaks to that.

“It’s easy to make sad work,” he says. “But to give people joy is a lot more difficult. I took that challenge. Let’s try to lift people’s spirits instead of being bummed out. Why not have a little levity?”

This isn’t to say he doesn’t recognize the power of work that’s more toned down than his. But he’s found a style that offers another side to that. It’s in his nature as an artist to step out of the status quo for his work. 

Even when he focused on street art, he explains, “With street work, a lot of the graphics were filled with testorone, and I was doing bubble letters, pastels, and doilies to soften that edge a little bit.” 

Inspired by quiltmaking and folk art traditions, it seemed clear from the start that Davis’s style was going to be a bit more vivacious than the work you would expect to see on the street, but he didn’t shy away from that. 

Start Choppin' (Dinosaur Jr.), Spray Paint on Panel, 24x36 in.

“My early work was with lace and stencil. There wasn’t a lot of abstract stuff on the street, so I started taking all these different patterns, like what you do with a quilt, and turning them into different designs,” he explains. 

His work is intricately geometric. Paired with his appreciation and attention to color, he leans into maximalism in a way that can’t always fully be embraced if you’re making street art on the fly.  

However, leaning into that style as much as he could in that scene garnered enough recognition to get commissioned for his first mural mentioned before. Since then, Davis has been lucky enough to create pieces on a grand scale that speak to the community from miles away.  

“The buildings got big and they kept getting bigger,” he remembers. “All of a sudden I was doing a two-story building, but the architecture that you’re working on opens up a nice challenge.” 

On top of the challenge of scale, Davis is also intentional about making work that actually resonates with the people living with the art. After all, quiltmaking and folk traditions are inextricable from the tradition of storytelling. 

To keep that spirit, although his work may feel abstract and whimsical, it often embraces a history on multiple levels that grounds the work. 

For the community, he often conducts research to find ways to connect his work to the history of a place, whether that be through color or pattern. 

“Quilts are a patchwork of different things, just like a neighborhood. I think the ones that are successful are the ones that are a mixture of people from different places and cultures that come together,” he explains. “My public work is a metaphor for them to be able to take all these patterns and colors that seemingly clash and make them work in unison.” 

For the artistic merit of the piece, the history of art itself that he’s working with isn’t lost on him. 

“As an artist, you have all of art history at your feet. All of that is fun, but I make rules and then find clever ways to break them,” he says. “There are boundaries that I’m working in, but I want to try to break those rules in a justifiable way.” 

Jaan Pehechaan Ho (Mohammed Rafi), Jersey City, New Jersey in India Square. Inspired by Indian block prints and textiles.

Even while working in the context of a certain community and its history or being commissioned by a major brand, Davis’s understanding of the history that surrounds his work and the ways in which he can push the envelope helps him to create work that maintains his stylistic integrity while also striking the right chord with his audience.  

While he’s been lucky to work with people who allow his work to breathe, his work isn’t dimmed by any parameters he works under. He just lets the work bloom around them. The challenge of any restriction only inspires more ways to maximize his work. 

“Art is just creating a set of problems that you have to solve. You have to figure things out and make it work for what you’re trying to achieve, and by narrowing the scope, it opens you up,” he says.

That’s his outlook as an artist, and you can see it in his work, whether it's his murals or current works on paper. He’s going to find ways to nod to his understanding of art history and the artists that have come before him as well as the history of the communities he works in while still giving himself room to honor his own style. 

“People tell me, ‘Your work is like you,’ he says. “I like taking these colors and making them work, which might be a little heady in color theory, but it’s instinctual too.”

And the beauty in it all is that although his work is so true-to-self, as an artist whose canvas is any given city around him, he allows that work to take on its own life in the eyes of the beholder. He recounts many times where he gets to interact with people seeing his work in the streets wondering what the piece is or what it means.

“I’m like ‘well what do you think it is,’ he says. “It’s not really supposed to be anything. It’s whatever you want it to be or whatever you see in it.”

Finding that balance between art that speaks to the history of a community, its current residents and himself all at the same time is exactly what makes Davis’s, or Hellbent’s, work so rich.

You can learn more about JMikal Davis on his website” https://jmikaldavis.com. WM