By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

Nikki Basch-Davis may be able to trace her visual art beginnings to graphic and interior design, but her heart is in plein air.

Basch-Davis’s newest show, “Inside-Out,” includes paintings done inside a studio. But it’s her work outside it — in the open air — that represents where she’s spent “most of my painting years.”

Basch-Davis graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 1965 with a degree in interior design. Prior to that she’d studied graphic design in her native Israel.

Over the years, she said, she’s worked hard to cast off those educational shackles.

“I find that my background, the graphic design days, the exactness of these early years, it is to my detriment. All this ‘should and shouldn’t’ — you really have to break through, and break those rules,” she said.

“It’s like I have tapes in my head, and when I paint, it goes into this very well-behaved image, and I’m thinking, ‘This is not what I want,’ but something in me says ‘OK, well, get it out of your system, then you can do the one you really want.’”

In many ways, she says, her education “still holds me captive. That’s my main pursuit, is to get myself free from that. It’s a lifetime struggle.

“The interesting part is, in my character I am very rebellious. You just tell me ‘should’ and you lost me. In my mind I’m not taking anything from anybody.”

In her early efforts on the canvas, Basch-Davis felt drawn to color because, she said, she lacked it in her “regimented education.” Watercolor was a particular interest, a medium she studied for years.

Once the owner of an interior design business in Walnut Creek (and later Lafayette), Basch-Davis “enjoyed doing stuff with people that made them happy.” But then the outdoors called.

In the 1990s, as a member of a group of Benicia painters who called themselves The Outsiders, Basch-Davis discovered how much she loved the plein air style — and the freedom to follow your experience and not be beholden to the urge to create a “good” painting.

Painting outdoors, “you really get out of the way. It’s from the gut,” she said. “There is a very happy thing about it — whether you do a good painting or not does not impair your experience so much. Because you are outside, you are with friends and you are doing something you love.”

Basch-Davis’s work on display at Gallery 621 through February is mostly oil on canvas, with some mixed media. Plein air, as you might expect, figures prominently.

But the exhibit also includes an assortment of clay figurines of people painting — just something she’s been “playing with,” but an example of her varied artistic interests.

“I had a really good time (with them),” she said. “You go out and do your paintings, and you always want to do the other stuff. You want to do the three-dimensional.”

But always she returns to the canvas — the “flat.” And there she constantly finds new sources of inspiration.

One painting, titled “Standing Alone,” shows a row of eucalyptus trees that once stood along a highway to Napa. Basch-Davis confesses a sentimental attachment to eucalyptus. “Some here look at them like weeds. I grew up with them. In Israel they saved the country, because we had swamps. People died from malaria. They brought them from Australia, and it was a miracle tree,” she said.

“I have a real sentiment to the smell, the looks, their laciness. It was my childhood. I find them fascinating.”

One of her studio pieces, titled “Generation Gap,” shows a younger woman and older man sitting on a park bench. The older man is reading a newspaper, while the young woman on a smart phone.

The juxtaposition — and the gritty surroundings — fascinate Nikki Basch-Davis even as she explains the scene.

“This is kind of a busy, turmoily city, urban,” she said. “He’s reading a newspaper, she’s reading the iPhone. Look at his body language!”

Visitors to Gallery 621 will have a chance to look for themselves until the end of the month. The gallery is open Thursday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

If You Go
Nikki Basch-Davis’s “Inside-Out” solo show of plein air and studio work will be on display at Gallery 621, 621 First St., through February. An opening reception will be held Saturday from 5-8 p.m. For more information, call 707-746-6211.