James D. Wilson

Bio

Wilson’s work explores the relationship between abstraction and memory, and his approach always starts with a series of drawings. Whether these are observational field notes or from memories of time spent in a place, they have a provisional feeling to them, as though glimpsed whilst on the move. He uses flashes of colour and minimal mark-making to make visual phrases, often cutting and re-assembling them in unexpected ways through collage.  The compositions that emerge from this process, even in their fragmented state, retain a sense of the places that inspired them. After a period of immersion, with this research material pinned to the studio wall, intuition plays its part in deciding how to develop it.

Sometimes this means further distillation, cropping to the point of non-objectivity, as can be seen in the more reduced side of Wilson’s visual language. Often produced in series, these works tend towards the graphical and urban, with fields of colour in carefully-selected colour palettes, laid over hard-edged relief elements. There are echoes of British Constructionism within its ‘assembled’ nature alongside its preoccupation with harmony, pattern and rhythm.

Other times, the works bear more recognisable hallmarks of landscape. Painterly gestures that speak of mountains, valleys and coastlines are interrupted with sudden cuts, hard-edges and mismatches. This mimics the way memories of places are prone to abstraction and yet our sense of those places remain familiar and vivid. The eye searches for continuity between the ‘broken’ parts which in turn gives the impression of the passing of time, changes in weather or experienceing landscape whilst being on the move. When present, the sculptural relief elements provide a rhythmic structure to the image-making.

He has shown non-objective and semi-abstract landscape works alongside each other because of their shared provenance. It has also led him to believe that it is not always useful to think about abstraction and figuration as mutually exclusive.