Director: Ferry Knijn
Running time: 1hr 16mins
Miles Davis is often quoted as saying what matters in jazz is “not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.” This documentary puts together a long string of pretty noises, but lacks a focus which means there are some very important un-played notes here, that become increasingly conspicuous in their absence.
Easton Davy is an artist originally from the Bronx, whose work ranges from abstract landscapes on recycled materials, to collage portraits of jazz icons, to free-flowing compositions painted live during the performance of a band – incorporating the energy and the mood of the occasion as he goes. One of the pieces he is particularly proud of is the legendary, musical maverick Miles Davis.
Talking to director Ferry Knijn’s silent camera, Easton goes into detail explaining how he “upcycled” various materials – including an antique dictionary, and cardboard from an Ikea package – to create the canvas, and some of the shapes contained within it. What he is less forthcoming with, is any insight on why he chose this medium. Does it say anything about the enigmatic subject of the painting? Why did he feel the time to commit this man – dead for more than three decades – to collage was now?
As the title of the film is a play on words involving Davy and Davis – Easton is a jazz-inspired painter, who we learn has travelled a great many miles while chasing his dreams – you might expect we’d come back to this later. What else does his relationship with the work of Miles Davis reflect about him, beyond being fuel for a pun? We don’t really get an answer.
It is not necessarily incumbent on the artist to talk about the meaning of their art. To paraphrase the late David Lynch, the art is the talking. But Easton Davis didn’t make this film, Ferry Knijn did. If we are going to spotlight the artist in a documentary, to tell audiences ‘This artist is one you should be paying attention to, and his story is important,’ it is incumbent on the filmmaker driving the project to ask those questions – to prod and provoke their subject into revealing some kind of insight we can understand, some kind of motive we can relate to. At no point in the 76 minutes of this film does it feel like there was any such effort to push Easton on anything – despite there being many opportunities to kick on, into more in-depth discussions.
The film begins with Easton revisiting his old stomping ground in New York. As he wanders around the neighbourhood he grew up in, he notes that the place was in disrepair, with crime and violence on the rise. Then his parents left, which felt like an escape. They instilled a rigorous work ethic in him in the years after, leading to him being able to make a living selling his art. That was that.
Later, he walks around the block he used to live in his solo-years. He had a two-story apartment, using the ground-floor as a gallery space, while living in a spacious loft above – but the rent went up, forcing him out. Returning to the place, he finds 30 years later that it has become a restaurant (the last acceptable faceof working-class creativity in the 21st century). He likes the fact they left the exposed bricks in the bar that used to be his bedroom. We move on.
In a moment where Easton threatens to let his guard drop – the endless barrage of anecdotal titbits subsides when he stumbles into something he “doesn’t even like to talk about” – the artist discusses a tumultuous breakup. After separating with his partner, he found himself in a custody battle for his son, Jacob – something which he won but did not expect to, as “on paper… the statistics show a man usually doesn’t win”. We take all that at face value.
It’s not that I am looking for a gotcha moment. I am not hoping for the director to wander into this man’s life, and trap him in his words, or make him feel miserable. But we need some potential for self-reflection, to make this feel like something other than a feature-length advert for his work. So, when things which will help us to invest in his story, when his thoughts and feelings beg for further exploration, there needs to be a moment where the filmmaker steps in and asks follow-up questions.
How does Easton feel about his family ‘escaping’ from the Bronx? Not just any family could even afford to just up and leave. Had he not been so ‘fortunate’, does he believe “hard-work” would have really been enough to have the life he has led?
What does Easton think about his old gallery space being stripped down and relaunched as a trendy-looking restaurant? Does it make him angry that though the neighbourhood is much ‘nicer’ looking than it used to be, this has been at the cost of pricing everyone he knew out of the place?
In the case of the custody battle, there are way too many variants to comment either way. While the assumption most custody battles are won by mothers by default is a little Fathers4Justice, given the statistics are shaky at best, I don’t know what was at stake in the disagreement. We don’t get anyone else’s side of the disagreements – not the mother, not Jacob – and scarcely even Easton’s. Beyond providing a means of introducing Jacob, who just gives testimony about how much he loves his father, it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose to have it in there.
This is not the only time Knijn and editing assistant Ashley Groenewald might have stepped in to trim the run-time. The laissez-faire approach they have used leaves many segments feeling like they are running in slow-motion. We get seemingly infinite moments of Easton looking at the walls of his former apartment, gasping wow, incredible, when really one (or at most two) would suffice.
Another example sees Easton gradually confess that he has friends who voted for Donald Trump, and he remains friends with them. To explain why, he cites Michael Jordan, who he says in the 80s and 90s resisted calls to be more outspoken on civil rights like Muhammad Ali, because “Republicans buy my sneakers too.” In 2022, it might have been easier to say that, because Democrats were still labouring under the illusion that they had ousted POTUS 45, but it still begs so many follow-ups. Is someone buying your products the same thing as someone accepting you? Should you have to pretend it is the same thing, for the sake of maintaining an income? Is keeping your head down and making slow progress really working, considering how quickly the American right has spiralled into Sieg Heiling hysteria that threatens to undo all of that progress in a couple of years?
Without following up on any of these points, it is hard to understand why this segment is in the film. Rather than making Easton seem prophetic or nuanced, he comes across as almost humorously oblivious to the political and social threats in his life, as they loom over him. It does not blend kindly with another segment, in which he recalls how on September 11th 2001, he walked into his office. His trip took him past the billowing smoke from the impact of the first and second planes, just down the road, but he only realised anything had happened when he saw other people in his workplace watching the twin towers fall on television. What lessons he took from that are left to our imagination – and from his thoughts on the MAGA movement, it does not appear that he learned much from keeping his head down, and narrowly stumbling past oblivion the first time around.
It needn’t be this way though. Easton seems like a pleasant, intelligent, passionate person, given the chance. I feel like if someone would probe a little deeper, he could talk these intriguing moments of contrast, in ways that would make him seem more relatable, and less like a passive non-observer, bumbling through the dangerous sweep of American history. Alternatively, in post, when it was too late to push on those fronts, a more pro-active bit of editing could have trimmed away a lot of this, and left us with a tighter, more vibrant form, where being flatly promotional of Easton’s undeniably cool work would have felt more appropriate.
In terms of its somewhat scattershot storytelling, Easton: Painting Miles might arguably be an appropriate format for the story of Easton Davis. As a jazz artist, a traditionally, rigid structure for this story would be a disservice to the music that flows through his work. At the same time, to represent such an eclectic and free-flowing life as a compacted, straightforward narrative could arguably be seen as disingenuous. But if we apply that Miles Davis quote here, some incredibly important notes have not been played here, in favour of a sea of winding anecdotes and under-developed concepts. The result is not a project which does not live up to its potential as a cohesive documentary.