Phoenix

Phoenix

39”x36”

Giclee on canvass

Price

$2,300

s/n edition

of 50

Originally Phoenix began back in 1987 as a large oil of about 6’x6’ but James didn’t like the feel as it developed and the painting was shelved. A few years later he made another run at the idea in pencil  and was successful but he had always envisioned the tropical image in color.

Now in 2009 he felt he could improve upon the pencil rending and the full color version of Phoenix was finally realized. When is a painting actually finished? When does your child stop being your child?

“As a younger man I use to perceive romantic love as a shell, a safe ideal place insulated from the hurts of the world like a citadel. But such a place is also a prison and a shell is a dead thing. I laid this metaphor to rest in Phoenix and turned the shell into a bird bath, amid an organized  graveyard of shells, in some kind of hope to invite true love to come lite like a bird in this place of previous desolation and like a Phoenix bring life to that dead place and to even one day, hopefully, become a garden after the tempest had passed.

The motif of the model’s hips are repeated in the negative shapes of the fence, the waterfall motif finds itself  in her hair and the foliage again in her shawl.’

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Related pieces.

‘The most salient motif originates in the symbol on the marble pillar as a metaphor for God- a Trinity wrapped into One. Without my consciously intending to make it so, I found the girl mirroring the stone symbol with her circular arms sporting the wrap’s tied wing at the top, flowing into three legs, two are hers  and the wrap making the third. This happens a third time with her  “circular” face, the flower standing for the tie/wing and her hair filling the legs place.

In contrast to the imprisonment of a shell, what replacement could be freer than a bird, One that took the invitation, blood red, and lit upon the very ruins of our greatest defeat? Now the girl holds fast her “covering” in red, made in the resemblance of her environment, to cover as the blood of Christ does cover us and gives us entrance into the Eden replanted by the ultimate Gardener.

We were made to inhabit Paradise but lost it and will never be at home till we return. But we cannot unless the entrance fee be paid for us, paid in blood not our own.  I also hold fast this red wrap, standing in a garden planted over my failures, forever reminded that on my own I never ever would have been able to return to such a place.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          JC