"Throughout my studio work, I think about memory and place, and about landscape as a point of departure. The imagery is often abstracted from particular places, or objects, without actually describing or illustrating them. I am trying to paint, draw, and sculpt the essence of my experience, to share it, in paint through light and color.
The paintings here at Froelick Gallery allude to ocean, water, and flow. Some indicate rock forms, even geological features. Frontier might be a land mass, a bright cliff. The Gates suggests both: a craggy ledge brimming over with water. In the smaller triad, Badge, Hunter’s Map, and Counterpunch, blue depths pacify floating whims of drift and creatures below water’s surface. The square Resilience suggests an obscured shoreline, a beach, interrupted.
Fable, the show’s title piece, was born after my seeing an exhibition of ancient hand tools, called First Sculpture, at the Nasher, last year in Dallas. Predating the cave paintings by 100,000 years, these sublime shapes demonstrate what is perhaps the earliest aesthetic decision-making by human beings. I was moved by the formal beauty and the early intentionality of the pieces in the show. In Fable, the strong suggestion of three-dimensional form is clear. From an ancient hand axe centering a fossil, springs a new canvas in reds, blues and milky green, watery again. Earth, stone, water, the history of us all."
-Terrell James, 2018
