My paintings are familiar places, landscapes, new spaces that are rugged and untamed. They are inventions shaped by forces of society, economics, technology, and nature, moving in a trajectory of constant re-invention. The paint surface and the pictorial incidents are in a constant state of transformation affected by daily observations and interactions. Forms are left to float in space, straight lines zig-zag and curve, parts speed up, others slide slowly by, patterns are left un-connected to forms. Time and space is not linear.
Painting is all about the process—I have a deep love of my materials and the physicality of paint. I enjoy working with and trying to combine different methods and applications of paint within one surface, this is in essence the accumulation of time and space. Elements in these paintings are not in the same space. Hard edges exist showing clear divisions of shapes and delineations of space. Through the process of layering and overlaps, illusions of paint, and a heavy-handed construction, a new world is emerging.
For me, collage is a way of combining multiple sources of information into one image, and I have been using them as a way of organizing and structuring my paint surface. Recently I have incorporated the method of printing into the work to represent multiplicity and productivity. Symmetrical, random, and intentional marks mesh together to build a new space, a pattern with a history that builds upon itself.
My paintings have been described as “familiar, dangerous, ordered and chaotic, and at times uneasy, representing the constant and often violent changes in the landscape thru a very ordered and symmetrical process.” As I work with these concepts to develop my pictorial language, the real subject matter is exploring. An attempt to form a new way of understanding today’s world and build upon the past, not as a sequential narrative leading from one point to the next, but as accumulation of observation and knowledge that is layered and recalled as needed.
email: jhighter@gmail.com