To the fast-moving eye of the contemporary art world, Lee Baxter Davis’s career would seem lost in the brambles of East Texas. Seventy years old this year, Davis has spent most of his life in and around the rural community of Greenville, teaching art at East Texas State University and serving as assistant pastor of St. William the Confessor Catholic Church—both honorable occupations, but not exactly platforms to attract the attention of international art dealers and critics. He works in large pen and ink drawings, often accented with watercolor, usually focused on a human subject. Bosch and Dürer are his two most obvious historical reference points (the former’s narrative mannerisms and the latter’s compositional sense), and indeed Davis’s art sometimes seems arrested in their late-medieval milieu of mysticism, alchemy and visions of eternal life.

Then, of course, one notices the fighter jets, the shotguns, the cowboys, the barbed wire, the jockeys playing badminton. The contemporary, or some mythical version of it, does get its due in Davis’s work, though often in the details. The central figures of each scene don’t exactly suggest the past, either, even as they act out mysterious parables. In Wild Ass (2007), a shirtless man in a safari hat, kilt and argyle socks fires a round through the back of his hobby horse’s head. In Vigilance of Penelope (2007), a nude older woman sips tea and reads a book in her hammock while the aforementioned jockeys (who are also angels) knock a shuttlecock (which is also a racehorse) over and around her body. Large animals dominate a few of the less active drawings, like Blood Has Flowed, the Crisis Has Passed (2004), where an iconic rhinoceros carries the naked and mutilated corpse of a man.

Given so much rich material, it’s tempting to trace stories, commentaries and references to Davis’s personal and spiritual life. The old pastor must be alluding to Tristam Shandy, The Odyssey, the Book of Job. He must be saying something about intellectual preoccupations, about fidelity, about divine power reflected in powerful earthly creatures. But the exact sentiment is never clear. As one wanders through the gallery, one’s meaning-making capacity is more and more bewildered. One is concerned at not “getting” all the references, that the work is either too personal to understand or beyond one’s education. This sort of dissonance may be Davis’s precise aim, something that he learned from the masters. As de Certeau says of Bosch, “The secret of The Garden is to make you believe that it possesses some sayable secret—or rather to promise one secret (meanings hidden from the understanding) in place of another (the enjoyment given to the eye.)”

Davis himself, teetering on the edge of outsider-ism, is another part of the puzzle. If Bosch’s garden is activated every time someone tries to pluck meaning from it, then how does that formula change when the artist is less famous, older and facing potential obscurity? What good is this whole language of symbols, if Davis is the only one fluent enough to know whether it’s nonsense? These questions lead to serious considerations about art (or the soul, for that matter) transcending death. Davis claims this as the real subject of his work: “The conflict between observed biological facts and certain metaphysical models of paradise, or the reality of death and concept of immortality.” These quasi-allegorical scenes take on a much more rooted meaning when cast in that light. 

The viewer may also be pleased to learn that Davis’s fine legacy as a teacher is beginning to advance his career as an artist. A few members of the generation of Texas artists he’s mentored—including Trenton Doyle Hancock, Gary Panter, Georgeanne Deen, Greg Metz and Robyn O’Neill—have recently helped to bring his work to larger audiences. From the Texas Biennial to New York, art appreciators are taking up the task of untangling Davis’s dense symbolic web.

Michael Agresta is a writer based in Austin. He's working on a book of fiction.