Artist’s Reception: Friday, February 3, 6-8 p.m.
James recently moved his studio to Ashtabula Harbor where he finds endless inspiration for his paintings. A native of Cleveland, James spent many years teaching drawing and painting, and doing commissioned portraits.
“These paintings and mobiles reflect rhythms that I have felt all of my life. My earliest paintings of these rhythms started when I was eighteen, and they show up from time to time, sometimes as backgrounds in figurative works, and sometimes as images on their own.
This current body of work started last spring after completing a lengthy portrait commission. They began with a series of small black and white canvases and have developed into large-scale paintings and sculptures.
I made the first sculpture of these rhythms in wax when I was an undergraduate student and cast them in bronze. I created the first mobile when I found a piece of sheet metal on the side of the road. After completing it I hung it in a tree in my back yard where I long ago left it to the elements.
I see these paintings and mobiles as symbiotic in that the paintings are reflected in the surface of the mobiles, and the mobiles cast shadows on the paintings as they move through space.”
