An Evolving Language of Abstraction

by Allen R. Gee, Ph.D.

Terrell James continues to create her own unique language as an abstract expressionist.  There are of course earlier exemplary American artists of the field: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, David Smith, Sam Francis, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Cy Twombly, and others.  While some writings try to associate James with the prominent neo-expressionists of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Julian Schnabel or Anselm Kiefer, she is not as preoccupied with overtly portraying the human body or as primarily concerned with communicating the human angst of inner disturbance or alienation.  Her work, although certainly emotional, elicits a stronger sense of timelessness, in part because landscapes—largely from the natural world, but sometimes from industrial cities—predominantly register as the starting places for most of James’ pieces (her sculptures are most frequently culled from found objects like geodes, rocks, shells, or bone).  To state that James’ art evokes timelessness means that while in its presence we are free to dwell in memory or imagine the future, or remain grounded in a present moment of strongly felt experience.

James’ work has evolved over the years to a more sophisticated canvas that successfully integrates several varying elements.  Her paintings contain refined brush strokes and swirls of paints, charcoal lines, swaths of color, chalk marks, thick graphite pencil drawings, written statements (paper on paper), figurative gestures, leeched edges and acrylic drippings.  James’ family owned a printing company; she grew up studying prints as a teenager, learning the intricacies of how to make mono-prints or mono-types.  To hear her speak of her process also leaves one with the impression that there is a Rothko-like care about the preparation of surfaces and specificity of materials for she employs several different techniques to make the “ground” of the painting more interesting to work upon, applying acrylic sealer, waxes, oil sticks, later using Resist so that color takes differently, and she recklessly edits her paintings, lifting off or thinning acrylic paint with rags, dampening with water and sponges, or letting edges of one color bleed into the edge of another.  The medium of oil has helped her to take more risks since what’s there doesn’t become lost like with watercolor; one can go back in.  Or new layers can be created over what’s opaque on top, to make a painting richer.  So she is constantly revising or examining her pallet to be as “open” as possible.

While landscapes often serve as the inspiration for many of James’ pieces (the Trans-Pecos area of west Texas, the Charente-Maritime in France, Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, Montauk, or most recently the Cape Fear region), she also paints in an urban studio near railroad tracks in Houston, and she lived for a year not long ago in Berlin.  For the exhibition Field Study, one can see that the paintings are not awe-induced by the experience of nature on a vast scale; rather, the paintings are created with an aesthetic that is more concerned about the sharing of a space, or the impression of wanting to be at one with the viewer.  Where Rothko’s shapes “loom, expand, and approach,” (Elaine de Kooning, 1958), James’ paintings invite the viewer to participate in an experience, to think or meditate, to remember or question or imagine.  Therefore the three hanging murals that constitute Maritime Forest are painted with the awareness that the eye moving across larger canvases takes more time, and the proportions are of an appropriate greater scale.  There is the understanding, as well, that to work with larger surfaces can require different ways of creating a space for the viewer to become engaged with; what’s most intriguing about Maritime Forest is that if a viewer stands back and closes his or her eyes, or if a viewer wishes, the two side panels can be perceived as being in the foreground or the background, or the center panel can be closer or further away.  James originally conceived the piece as two panels but then adapted to the larger space with a third panel; she is grateful to curator Douglas Sprunt who confirmed her aesthetic choice, liking the idea of sequencing three panels rather than two before ever seeing them.  Distinctive lines always serve to energize a James painting, large or small, as well, and in Maritime Forest the lines can be suggestive of staggered trees, shadows, paths, branches, or vines, while the white segments can also be seen as foreground or background spaces, depending upon a viewer’s prerogative.  

Form is often a subject of James’ work, and there is frequently an edge or tension between the abstract and the figurative.  This is a departure from much of Gorky’s work, which can be called “quite figurative,” or in which scenes or representations can clearly be recognized.  Indeed, James does not “plan” or even thumbnail sketch beforehand, but paints more freely, living in the moment of expression as much as possible, akin to Surrealist automatic drawing or the riffing of jazz.   And while Cy Twombly’s work is linked to particular historical events because of the content of its writings, James’ written statements more often than not become layered over, covered to the extent that only partial lines remain which are not even recognizable to a viewer as originating from text.  So in addition to the form of the shelf that James speaks of in a preceding interview and the painting being a tribute to Walter Hopps, there are curves and lines in James’ Shelf that might have originated from drawings or larger pieces of writing, and the act of painting over or significantly concealing statements can be symbolic or parallel to what is happening to the sanctity of the written word in our over-technologically infused culture. 

Tidal Threshold is the large piece in Field Study which most exemplifies James’ dramatic or emboldened use of color, and it as a colorist that James distinguishes herself the most from any other past or present abstract painter.  Many of her canvases display a fearlessness with color that is based upon an unprecedented high-keyed color scale.  In many of her works over the past few years there are vivid canary yellows, hot pinks, aqua-marine blues, heart-stopping violets or reds, and on the other end of the spectrum there are deep dark blues, stone grays and nocturnal blacks.  What James is careful to do is that she never employs strong colors that result in an overall feeling of happiness, or that simply instill a serene effect.  Instead there can be an acidity that is edgy, a tension that helps balance the abstraction of the shapes and lines.  The sharpness of color or color contrast is catching also, and with this harshness or collisions of shades there can be so much brightness that the austerity of other parts of a painting are emphasized, areas that will seem more muted, which is akin to value shifts in music.  James color choices can also be interpreted as parallel to feminist voices, or they can be seen as symbolic of exploring one’s own individual furies.  Away from the studio her color influences derive from the wildness of color that can be found upon computer screens, or from digital images, seen within advertising mediums in the city, and so her “field” of study continually extends beyond the “natural” world of the outdoors.

All of the bright color in James’ paintings also gives rise to an inverse effect; we are reminded of how for most of us there’s not really that much color in our daily moments, and so a viewer is reminded of how human, or limited, most of us otherwise are.  Another way of saying this is that James’ louder palette evokes a quiet because more significance is given to color because of how the colors play off each other, whereas Rothko’s work often creates a space and depth that can be entered.  His pieces require or dictate a quiet, is another way to describe the difference of aesthetics.  In addition ultimately for a James painting value content is very important because it directs where the eye goes, and so the eye will almost seem to know where to travel, with value being more pertinent than hue.  The color palette, in other words, is not symmetrical or orderly, like in so many works that are obvious studies of color; James’ colors can appear off-balance or topsy-turvy, but the painting will work—it has to—in spite of those traits.  The swirls of color appear like blooms or the essence of a thing; there is an organic feel or mood, or it could be said that each swath or swatch of color equates to a florescence.  The effects of this, in particular in her smaller works—or when viewing the Field Studies within Field Study—is that a cinematic experience can be evoked, moving from one canvas to the next, as the eye registers a plethora of colors.

Part of this aesthetic includes how less white is mixed in, and when white is used it’s to suggest something in front of a field of color, like drawing, or more lines and other forms, but white is not used to the extent of creating a determined background or foreground; there is none of the old modernist illusory effect of the painting acting as a camera lens or a portal upon a single, determinate subject or scene.  Tidal Threshold possesses a great amount of white space which can be suggestive of light, but the eye also encounters neutral gray, oxide black, olive green deep, yellows, oranges, green blues, purples, and yellow red.  The multitude of colors gives more significance to color, offsetting all of the white.  The colors play off each other, but not in a decorative sense, and not to create harmonic chords.  Also at work is an awareness of primal forces, seen in the inclusion of objects, or to describe them more aptly, artifacts, which always create a sense of history, or ask the viewer to contemplate a sense of one’s own place in time.   At some point James began sculpting the objects she was drawing, to become closer to her painting, which gave rise to Family, the series of bronze sculptures included in Field Study.  James, it should be noted, is an admirer of Paul Klee, whose work with the artifact fascinates her.

Among other artists who are James’ influences, she currently has her eye on Jill Moser, Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou, and Vija Cilmans, to name a few.  She remains interested in the writings of Henri Bergson and Paul Tillich, Teilhard De Chardin, Merleau-Ponty.  These considerations, combined with all the aspects of James’ evolving abstract aesthetic, or in other words, the painterly intelligence at work, should be kept in mind for any discussion of James’ art.  One other way of saying this is that James is trying to bring everything she sees to the canvas now—an abstract tradition, other art, literary influences, the natural world, urbanity, the importance of a brush stroke, forms, color choices, drawing, the meaning of the artifact, as well as how she feels when painting a canvas at the moment, and most of her work is titled long afterwards so that further contemplation is part of the artistic process, so in this careful way, the whole integrated field of each painting is her concern—all while having something meaningful to say.