At the age of five, Keni Davis discovered a crayon drawing of a fox in the woods. "Who did that?" he asked his grandmother.

"Your mother," she replied.

"From that moment on, I've tried to create beautiful art," the artist explains.

Growing up in Winfield, Kansas, Keni studied hard and played hard. He has an older brother, also an artist, and a younger brother and sister.

Evidence of his artistic ability presented itself when he was about seven. " I drew a Viking ship as the logo for a club." Keni chuckles and continues the story in mellow throaty tones. "Each boy gave me five cents to draw one for him. My first commission!"

Keni had big dreams, even in high school. "My mother was very supportive of me and my wild ideas. While other high school sophomores built magazine racks as woodshop projects, I tackled a regulation-size pool table."

The family moved to southern California when Keni was a senior in high school. After attending community college for a while as a business major, he landed a job as a scenic artist at NBC.

During breaks he sketched what he saw behind the scenes. He took that little sketch pad with him wherever he went and recorded what he observed on movie and television sets such as "The Midnight Special" hosted by the late Wolfman Jack. "I got to watch some great musicians and singers perform live," Keni says of those days."

Steven Spielberg's "Amazing Stories" was a favorite show. "I supervised a paint crew and did much of the creative set painting," the artist recalls.

Keni has also worked on movie sets like Stir Crazy. On the last day of the filming, Keni presented a book of sketches made during the shoot to each cast and crew member, including director Sidney Portier and stars Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. "My art opens a lot of doors and has brought me before great talent in both the movie industry and the corporate world. However, it tends to produce some interesting responses when I editorialize with it."

A science fiction buff, Keni was thrilled to work on one of the Star Trek movies. "Sometimes when I come into my studio late at night, I look at the many green and amber lights of my computer system glowing in the dark and imagine that I'm on the bridge of the Enterprise."

Fifteen years of show biz sketches are the foundation for Keni's latest artistic endeavor, the Hollywood Backlot series of paintings. "My style is mostly realism," Keni says. A vivid, richly detailed realism, where crisp images and bright acrylics or pastels make the viewer wonder if the scene truly does exist. "Peggie's", the first in the series, represents a chateau near Marseilles in southern France. "I named it after my wife, My staunchest supporter."