Where the Wild Things Are: Meet Artist Dani Knoph-Davis

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Outside Dani Knoph-Davis’s home/studio, a thin layer of snow encases winter’s dormancy—but the snug building perched in the woods above Lake Charlevoix is alive with turtles, fish, butterflies and grouse. Some of the fauna are precise replicas of the real thing, rendered by Davis in ink and watercolor. Others fly, flutter and float through her rich imagination, one that has been fed by an intrinsic connection to wildlife since she was a young girl. Davis’s grandparents were both wildlife artists—her grandmother painted impressionistic landscapes, while her grandfather carved exquisite, lifelike birds. Some of Davis’s earliest memories are of watching them at work in their cabin in Gaylord. “Seeing all the color in my grandma’s paintings when I was little was like a symphony in my brain,” Davis recalls.

As a young girl, Davis loved paddling out in a red kayak that her grandparents kept at the cottage and observing the wildlife around her—particularly loons and bass who would often trail her kayak in an effort to shoe her out of their territory.

After graduating with an art degree from University of Michigan, Davis lived in Seattle for a time. Her experience there fueled an interest in salmon, given, as she says, “That salmon are such a big part of the culture out there.” Davis expressed her new-found passion in a series of ink-and-watercolor paintings of Pacific salmon—each painstakingly researched and rendered in lifelike detail.

When she moved back to Michigan several years later, Davis learned of the state’s initiative to repatriate Arctic grayling to Northern Michigan waters. Until the early part of the 20th-century, the beautiful iridescent fish were abundant in our rivers and streams. But just a few decades later, they were completely extirpated in our region by over-fishing and loss of habitat. “I got involved with the initiative and just kind of went down the rabbit hole about learning about them,” she says. That focus naturally led her to do a series of paintings of the grayling, which included a collaboration with Iron Fish Distillery in Thompsonville for one of their whiskey labels.

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Davis has since moved on to research and paint butterflies, turtles and birds in their native habitat, always focusing on threatened species and spending as long as two to three months on each painting. Currently Davis is working on a series of paintings for the Grand Traverse Conservancy.

Purchase Davis’s work at the Bier Art Gallery in Charlevoix, NorthGoods in Petoskey and online at dani-knoph.myshopify.com.