Interview with Terrell James
Doug Sprunt
Terrell James: Field Study (exhibited at Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC, 2011) is curated mainly from work that was on hand at the artist’s studio and in progress. Two of the main works within the exhibition, the currently untitled Cape Fear and Woodland murals, which will be finished by the artist before and during the exhibition, are based on the artist’s experience of the lower Cape Fear River region. There is a resonate spirit and language writing of place in these paintings that relate to Clyde Connell’s work as well as the grounding and underlying current of realized lives and the wisdom and courage resulting from an artist’s expression of both spirit and place (footnote: both Wilmington and Lake Bisteneau are part of the longleaf pine forest belt, the oldest forest ecosystem in North America, which runs along the mid Atlantic seaboard across northern Florida and through Louisiana into east Texas).
The following conversation recorded this year at the artist’s studio in Houston expands on these themes and relationships.
THE CONVERSATION
DS: In 2001, before an exhibition at Pillsbury Peters, you told Ted Pillsbury, “through nature I find my own nature.” The relationship between one’s self and nature is fascinating to me — nature of place and the nature of self — and it is what I believe that I initially respond to in your work.
TJ: Well, I think if you’re sensitive to nature and the perceptual changes nature registers, or triggers… let’s say, the change of light from six in the morning to noon, this fact, this observation brings forward the idea about vulnerable change in ourselves, mortality… the whole idea about what we’re doing with our time and the intention of each thing. I have a reverence for the same sort of thing that Clyde Connell was looking at I think, it’s hard to put into words, but a kind of upholding of pattern and meaning that you find within each organism, like a tree, or the side of a cliff, or stream. And she would reorder, and in her observation of the thing in nature, bring her own form through the material she was working with. I do this at a smaller level: paint is basically earth, ground up minerals, and the color comes through. I think of working with paint as a kind of transformation of natural materials, in the same way as medicine is derived from plants.
When people ask me what I’m doing with my work, I talk a little bit about nature and the landscape, but I also talk about the evolution of my own language that started as I was working more and more for the last twenty-five years, evolving into something that’s recognizable as mine. It is abstract, and it does have a sort of urge to be read as a nascent thing, or a thing that’s coming into being.
We can look up and make sense of looking at the passing clouds, which we have so many of in Texas. I like the word “imagination…” having image in it… and the idea that something I do can evoke associative meaning for someone else. And if you are open to artwork, it grows with you and keeps changing, if it’s good, if it’s real.
DS: The way in which you handle color and combine color is intriguing, sometimes challenging, sometimes intensely beautiful, also quiet and measured. Could you talk a bit more about your understanding and use of color?
TJ: I seem to have a non-analytical instinctive sense of color that is unusual and also appealing to me. One thing interesting about the Field Studies series is that over the years, you can track the exploration of color in the palette from the studies, which are corollary to the big more formal canvas paintings. They show what’s going on in the paintings and how they change.
DS: There is this spirit of openness, a sense of freedom with the Field Studies that is immediately attractive and at the same time there’s something difficult for me to articulate… an underlying power that seems to come from both your experience and maturity as an artist… courage maybe.
TJ: In the mid ‘nineties, I was working on dense small paintings and I was building glazes, over a period of months, even years, almost like trapping a bug in amber. The paintings were so layered that they were kind of crazy, it was hard to even see into them after a while. I found one day that I liked the throw-away palette, on which I was mixing the paint, just as well as the canvas, and I thought, what is this telling me? Maybe I need to be a little more open and let things from my hand command the eye, don’t bury the image, don’t hide or lose the thing itself. When you were talking about the Field Studies and color a minute ago, I just had this image come up of blooms of color. Like the gesture within the Field Studies… bubbles of color coming up from a fissure in the water, or some sort of release of a sea-creature’s ink hit by a fish going by, waves of wild bright colors suspended, floating up and down, aquatic gravity and a lack of regular perspective. And I work on them flat rather than on the wall or on an easel, so there’s a different space (relationship/approach?).
But then sometimes they seem to be fragmenting and breaking apart before they’re able to coalesce into a form. So they really are notes… color notes.
DS: There is a wonderful evolution in Clyde Connell’s work, and her life… traveling to New York on church conferences and looking into the art galleries and meeting artists there and being so impressed with their work. She read Paul Tillich, the theologian, and was profoundly influenced by his ideas – in the ‘50s, I believe. She moves to Lake Bisteneau where her husband becomes warden of the local penal colony and where she comes to grips with herself as an artist. And her work is so deeply informed by that place.
TJ: I didn’t know that she’d been such a fan of Paul Tillich’s, and I think that’s fascinating because I also have a real attachment to his ideas and was influenced by his theology and his idea of God. You know he doesn’t like the word God, instead he referred to this as “the ground of being.”
My God, I remember sitting with Clyde, just on this path, and she was moving these small stones around, and taking pieces of dried grass and arranging them, and there it was, the ground of being- of being with Clyde. It was fantastic… that was about 1982 at the camp in Lake Bisteneau. I was intensely impressed by the ambition and scale and clarity of her work. And she was pretty delicate and small in frame, but such a force, and at the same time humble, I really was quite taken by her.
I think a lot of artists have their own way of answering that question of what is human and what is beyond the body, what is maybe spiritual, what has to do with human rights and justice and the platform of truth telling that if your work is about more than decoration and is trying to communicate something more personal, I think a lot of times it has to do with concerns for the greater community, whether it’s civil rights and the desegregation issue of Clyde’s time or a different way of living with the environment of our time and with justice for all people.
DS: And in that trial, if you will, there are moments where there’s some kind of reckoning- like with Clyde in understanding a deeper sense of purpose around civil rights and a broader spiritual life around the ideas of Paul Tillich- in which it seems people connect with these deeper streams of direction, or energy, or inspiration that then become the reason why they paint, or write, or works.
TJ: Exactly. And you might feel like you’re just stumbling along until you get into that particular deeper stream. But you still have the urge to keep pushing along to get there, right?
DS: Getting back to the idea of place… there’s this ancient understanding of the land and ourselves which has been unfortunately buried or lost…
TJ: Decimated!
[laughter]
DS: It’s always fascinated me how a given culture or person might respond to place. There’s this information that is available in these places (and within ourselves) that’s difficult to define… the more I try to define it the less available it seems to be. So it requires, it seems, a letting go…
TJ: It’s not really up to you. There’s this whole big system supporting your existence. It’s like what I was saying about the oral tradition of teaching something like painting… bringing forward this knowledge that’s been passed on through my teachers and their teachers. We could think of this not just in terms of teaching, but of just being. And in that sense, it doesn’t matter how old a city is or a country is. It’s more like how old a star is.
DS: This is one of the things that’s been so satisfying to me in studying the longleaf pine forest… becoming immersed in it, surrounded by lovely things and by things that want to eat you alive.
[laughter]
And there are moments of understanding, you know, that the depths of what it is that I’m looking at here are absolutely infinite… that I can spend a lifetime studying this forest.
TJ: Infinitude is basically terrifying.
[laughter]
DS: After your experience (with cancer) there seemed to be a boldness in your work.
TJ: I’d say a louder voice coming out. Everybody I know who’s gone through some sort of cancer experience who’s a visual artist, their work just- it’s like ten times deeper after that. I don’t know why. You don’t have fear in the same way. At least I don’t.
DS: I understand that.
TJ: So maybe if you don’t have fear about dying, you don’t have fear about expressing yourself either. There’s nothing to hold you back. There’s more than that though – I can’t really put it into words.
DS: Maybe in letting go of fear, space opens up for this new sense of self, or relationship to the world- new meaning begins to flow in- that’s what I have become aware of. And I’m not in control of this. The more I try to control it, and codify it, and make it about myself, the less I get to participate- the less it shows up.
We chose the to title the show Field Study because I think this greater sense of life is just that.
TJ: Exactly.
DS: A broader permission one allows oneself to accept life, and in doing so all sorts of new inspiration arrive, subtle energies…
TJ: And observations- you don’t have the static getting in the way of perception. And maybe the process keeps unfolding and opening new things when you’re not trying to get in the way and preconceive it.
DS: Watching you working yesterday, you took one of the Field Studies that was still wet and turned with it and applied it onto one of the paintings that you’re building right now. That transfer, it was as if it was completely instinctive and the result was terrific. All of the sudden a part of the painting was anchored and had a new sense of strength…
TJ: And space. It totally changed the lack of defined space. And it might look like I just wander off and do these things, but I’ve been doing them for thirty-five years. I can know in the weirdest way, that’s nonverbal, that I don’t really even know that I know, and it’s great. Going back in the conversation a bit, that’s sort of how I feel about color.
DS: The Field Studies that we have selected are mainly from the work you did in Montauk at Edward Albee’s place. And the show is becoming something more as we are working on it… there’s a lot informing this show.
TJ: I felt that from the beginning. I think it has something to do with Walter Hopps for some reason… like a confluence of Deborah (Velders), Deborah in Wilmington, you, and you and Walter, even (Walter’s friend) Dennis Hopper and Blue Velvet and the discovery of the ear at Brunswick Town (footnote: While viewing the display at the Brunswick Town museum, both the Curator and the Artist are certain they found David Lynch’s inspiration for the severed ear shown buried just underneath the suburban lawn in the opening scenes of Blue Velvet).
Shelf is an important painting for me, and I think it has a lot to do with the TransPecos, and the color our there, and the strength of the form there. I’ve worked on it here mostly in this studio, in this room where we are now. But it’s brooding, I think… it was all done around the time when Walter was dying.
Shelf refers to the idea of the use of the word shelf in geology. And it also is a place to put objects that have personal, maybe even nostalgic meaning, a place to put your memories or things that bring forward memories. And the form in that painting, that you can see recurring in my work a lot- a sort of sequence of geological, or soldier-like vertical forms, and then a kind of cutoff at the top that might suggest a horizon line. There’s a kind of flatness to the painting, and graphic strength in the balck and dark brown that defines the gray spaces and the white spaces. It’s a painting I haven’t been with for several years now, and I’m really looking forward to seeing it again. I think it’s one of my strongest large paintings and I’m excited that we’re going to include it.
A lot of what I find meaning in later, after I finish a painting… I name it later, and I think about what it means later. It’s very rare that I actually begin with an idea that is still the main idea of the painting when it’s finished. For instance, I was just talking about the painting on the easel a minute ago that had to do with being in Joshua Tree. Well that could end up being not really about that place. When I was painting Shelf, I had no idea it was about Walter… I wasn’t trying to do a painting about Walter. Do you see?
DS: I do.
TJ: Sort of like what you’re saying about the way the show’s coming about. We don’t really know what we were trying to say until we were almost through. So that’s typical of the way I seem to work and think… non-verbally, or something.