PITTSBURGH—On a semi sunny Saturday morning, John Davis sits on his front porch in Squirrel Hill, a bustling Pittsburgh neighborhood, drinking coffee as the city awakens around him. It’s a moment of calm for an artist who’s built his life on balancing the light and the dark—grief and joy, destruction and creation, impermanence and renewal.
For John, who has spent much of his life working in the bereavement space, creativity has always been a natural outlet for processing life’s harder edges. “I’ve worked in social work, cemeteries, natural burial parks—places where mourning and memory are intertwined with the everyday,” John explains. “It’s hard not to think about impermanence when you’re dealing with grief every day. But there’s beauty in it, too, a space for growth and new life.”
This duality is at the heart of John’s artwork, which blends industrial textures with intimate portraits of people, combining elements of decay and vibrancy. His process is unique: a simple walk around Pittsburgh, capturing textures of eroding walls, spray paint, and natural elements, all on his iPhone. He then started layering them over portraits he’d taken of people in the city. “It was just fun at first, something to mess around with. But then I realized that the process, the evolution of these images, was what was so compelling to me”, John recalls. The laying effect added an additional element, it changes with the light of day. “In the morning, it’s one thing—by night, it’s something else entirely,” he says with a smile.
The concept of change is something John is intimately familiar with, given his background. His experience in the memorial space has informed much of his approach to art. “Grief isn’t something you get over in a day. It’s a process, just like art,” he says. “That’s why I love doing these portraits—they’re a way to memorialize people, places, and moments that are constantly shifting. It’s about capturing the essence of someone, but also acknowledging that nothing stays the same.”
His work is deeply personal, yet John is more interested in what others can bring to it. He invites his subjects to take part in the creative process. “I’ve done pieces where I ask people to take their own photos, rather than me doing it. It’s amazing how different their perspective can be,” John says. “There’s a collaboration there that brings a whole new dynamic to the work.”
Beyond his art, John has been facilitating memorial craft workshops, where people are encouraged to use their own family photos and memories to create dreamlike collages. These workshops offer a hands-on approach to dealing with grief, a way of turning mourning into something creative and tangible. “It’s about getting families involved in memorialization in a way that’s not purely transactional,” John explains. “It’s about rekindling the creative spirit in people, even when they’re in the midst of loss.”
John’s desire to make art accessible to everyone is a major driving force behind his work. “We’ve created this notion that art has to be exclusive or expensive to have value, and that’s just not true,” he says. “For me, the real value is in the process—the connections we make with each other, the stories we share.”
That belief led him to join Local Good, a Pittsburgh-based community for artists and creators. “I’m not in galleries, I don’t sell online,” John says. “But when Desiree reached out and offered me space on Local Good, it just felt right. It’s a community of people who care about art for the sake of connection, not profit. That’s the kind of space I want to be a part of.”
In the end, John’s art isn’t about the final product—it’s about the journey, the process, the act of creating something that resonates with people on a deeper level. “I never set out to be an artist,” he says, “but I’ve found that the most meaningful things in life are the ones we stumble upon by accident.”
As the city of Pittsburgh continues to evolve, so too does John Davis. And as he builds new lives through his work in construction and helps families honor old ones in his workshops, he remains committed to the idea that art and life are not so different after all. Both are about finding meaning in the spaces between loss and renewal, between the past and the present.
And for John, that’s where the magic happens.