James MacAyeal
I paint in acrylic and oil on canvas, wood panel, and masonite. My paintings include figurative and abstract works, as well as landscapes. These works express my most intimate feelings and memories of people and places in my life, as well as celebrating the components of art and its source in abstraction.
Many of my figurative paintings include female nude images that emerge from memories ranging from the passionate to the mundane. I hope to show the equality of subject and artist, memories and presence, or fantasy and reality that exists in my mind. The viewer of my nudes is invited to bring their own memories to these paintings and merge or compare their own experiences with the one seen. The lucid fluidity of this is expressed in the dripping and flowing paint that graces the canvases around the within each nude. The tactile and textured surfaces elicit the physical nature of the nude and suggest a valid potency with the image burned into our minds or onto a canvas. In my abstract paintings, colors, textures, and movement find dynamic interplay. I bring a color field and lyrical approach to each abstract work, hoping to tell a unique story to the viewer. The viewer may get a sense of the story I had when I made the painting, but will quickly combine it with their own story. The only notion I wish to convey is notion itself, using textured and colorful abstracts to evoke language not translatable into our common words. The landscapes I create are lyrical, colorful, and at times fantastical. I am particularly interested in places that were once natural but have since been developed. In some cases I portray farms and rustic camps that are long gone and exist only in photos or written histories. The once-alive place that no longer exists speaks to me as a valid place that cannot be removed by concrete or abandonment. The boundaries of time and space vanish as these paintings give to these places a beautiful and tranquil sustenance that will go on. The onlooker of these paintings is invited to see these places through the expressive portrayal of memory and fantasy. |