Meadowlark A James Jean Solo Exhibition Exhibition Walkthrough with James

So this is a show that took about a year to put together. I started all the sketches last year and now we're here in Vancouver where we've brought in my slingshot sculpture. This is done in mirror polished stainless steel and the boy's using his eye as a projectile and has various references. I think the most obvious being David versus Goliath, Hammurabi's code of ethics, an eye for an eye, but also represents for me the self-sacrifice it takes as you take aim for your ambitions. This is the title wall for the show. I designed this script here. I wanted to describe the title of my show in a script that was barely legible. I think that speaks to the overall theme of the show being that it's about difficulty to communicate. For me, it's about a loss of language. Growing up in New Jersey after having moved there from Taiwan when I was three, I quickly lost the ability to speak Mandarin and that's a regret and shame that's haunting me to this day and that's something that is prevalent in paintings where a lot of these characters are struggling to find connection and meaning and struggling to find a place of belonging. This painting is called Deer 2. Going along with that idea of loss, you see the antler coming loose. For me, it's almost like losing a tooth in a dream and in the place of the antler, there's a maze motif that is prevalent throughout a lot of my work. If you zoom in here, you can see there's a tiny spider weaving a web and the idea of the web being a way to connect things together. Again, that's searching for connection and belonging. I also like how we have the orbs here emerging from the hair done in a more graphic style but then we have a trompe-l'oeil style water droplet here. I like the tension between the illusion of the water droplet on the same painting as a more graphic element. So that kind of conversation between the different possibilities that you can achieve with painting from something more illusionistic to something more graphic. I like peeling away those layers or having those layers kind of interact on the surface of a painting. So let's go. This is a painting called The Bear and it's the largest painting in the show. So we have our hero here kind of having a conversation with the rabbit. We have other rabbits climbing along its back and I love drawing waves and flowers and these kind of arcing forms recur a lot in my work. These shapes just happen organically, I think, intuitively in the way I draw and put together composition. Oh, we got dead air, dead air now because now I'm at a loss for words. This painting is called Aurelion's Three or Four. Actually, I lost count. I think it's Aurelion's Three. So we have a boy catching butterflies and that's what an Aurelion is. It's someone who collects butterflies. And if you zoom in close, I think this is something that's hard to appreciate from seeing my paintings online. So there's actually a lot of texture and color hidden within the surface. So you have little bits of blue and yellow and orange and they all sort of optically mix as you look at the painting. And the surface has a very interesting quality too. So there's kind of a modeling effect amid all the hand-painted lines. Sometimes people say that my paintings look too perfect, almost digital, but when you see them in person, you actually get a sense of how things are made. This is called Yonin and it's a unique framed edition that I recently made. So it's 10 layers of acrylic sandwiched together to make almost like a diorama, but it's viewable from both sides. So you have the picture in the front, but as you go around the back, you can see sort of spine that's coming out from the head of the animal. So I love how going around both sides of the image, you can get a deeper sense of the story. And the rain is done in clear gloss and that's meant to kind of heighten the sense of parallax in the piece. And we have some subtle brass detailing here. There's a tiny hummingbird in that brass part and it goes straight to the back too. So you can see the tiny brass hummingbird there. This painting here is called Erhu Two. So we have a woman playing a traditional Chinese instrument, but actually it's made out of this crane. And again, referring to the idea of struggling with communication, you know, the beak of the bird turns into the instrument. So the crane can't cry out using its beak. It's actually resonating with the bow as she's attempting to elicit a song out of the instrument. Yeah, again, I like the various layers, the different graphic qualities. So, you know, we have this flat graphic character here. In the background, we have a more atmospheric landscape. And then we also have another trompe l'oeil water droplet there. So yeah, you have these various dimensions on a two-dimensional painting. This painting is Dragon Two. And this character here is sort of a collector. I guess she's holding a very expensive looking Ming vase. And on the back are our totems. Here we have an interesting character here. This is kind of a bamboo, young bamboo-like monk meditating on top of a stone sculpture. Again, we have a landscape of Chinese mountains in the background, except done in a very unusual light blue color. Especially in this painting, there's a lot of texture and washes. Sometimes I put too much texture on, it kind of destroys the painting. And then I have to go back and pull things back out again. And that's always the challenge. And the interesting part of painting is kind of introducing that layer of chaos back into something that is more precise. Because these paintings do start out as something very precise. You can see how these lines end up becoming very kind of intentional. But then I apply like a wash of color to kind of push everything back and introduce some randomness into the surface. So this one's also called Yonin. This was the painting. And for the edition, I basically totally recreated it on the computer. But she's holding this animal here that's kind of either coughing or struggling to cry out. And you know, in the painting, it's kind of soundlessly crying out. And that's kind of, you know, how I feel when I'm trying to speak Chinese because I can't really, you know, it's just a mental block somehow that has prevented me from being able to, you know, connect back with my culture. Yeah, here we have some sketches, original sketches that I did for the paintings. See the changes here. There's a different head here for Erhu too in the beginning. And then we have the revised head there. So in these sketches, you can see some thumbnails that I did to start out the composition or to start figuring out some ideas. And then the final piece here, which ends up being pretty detailed and involved. You know, these small sketches ended up and they end up being the guide for the large paintings almost exactly. There's a lot of energy in the original sketch. So I actually scan these and print them out large so that I can refer to them while I'm painting. So I'm always struggling to kind of maintain the original energy in the sketches. Back here we have some of the color studies that go along with the sketches. I'll basically scan the sketches in and color them up in Photoshop. And then we'll call out swatches of all the various colors and then hand mix acrylic to match with the swatches on the printout. And this all takes, you know, a very long time to do but it saves me a lot of time along the process. I'm constantly juggling different paintings at the same time and you know, doing these flat colors on the paintings actually is incredibly tedious. So I have some help with that and then once the flat colors are done, then I'll go in and do all the rendering and the shading, the gradients and then the texturing and the line work. So there's a lot of preparation that's required to make paintings of this type. I do other paintings where they're more direct and spontaneous but yeah, this is just how the paintings have evolved over time. You know, this wasn't the process I began with. It was something that I sort of developed over time. I thought it was funny my friend pointed out that the thumbnail for the bear was this tiny very simple sketch there and somehow it kind of exploded into this very elaborate composition. This is a painting called Scribe and so it's a combination of various different references. So the bottom of the figure is inspired by Goya's Sleep of Reason produces monsters. So we have this slumbering kind of figure and the top forms are inspired by Hilma AF Clint and there's a little bit of Laura Owens here with these flat abstract shapes and yeah, I'm always pulling from different sources and this painting kind of has an interesting quality in that there's like a real vibration between the orange and the teal and in my color palettes I'm always trying to create a unique combination of colors to kind of, you know, create a lot of tension but also harmony at the same time. So trying to achieve that balance is, you know, always interesting. This piece is called Alluvium and you see this woman here kind of struggling to squeeze out her thoughts, excrete out these, I guess, clay-like forms that are creating these accretions on the bottom here. I also quite like these kind of abstract textures and shapes. This sort of happens at the end of the painting, you know, after everything is done, the painting always tells me it needs something else and in this case, it needed something to kind of activate the background to create, you know, various areas of energy and yeah, after I created these kind of like floral like splatters, I drew in, you know, these stems to kind of turn them into forms that resemble flowers. Yeah, I also like how, you know, these shapes here kind of resemble like fish eggs or tadpole eggs. You know, at the same time we have forms like these where there's the orb here but this is done very organically by letting the paint dry on its own using a lot of water as the painting lies flat and then I'm taking kind of those forms and turning them to something more intentional. So again, there's that conversation between, you know, something that's more accidental and something that's more programmed or designed. Here we have a painting called Mountain and this painting has a lot of personal significance to me because, you know, this character is struggling to carry these forms on his back and these forms kind of resemble Chinese radicals. You know, these are just shapes that I drew and that resemble those Chinese characters, you know, as opposed to Chinese characters being, you know, fluidly written in calligraphy. These forms are these very heavy crumbling blocks, kind of representing the crumbling architecture of my memory and my inability to remember how to speak Chinese, let alone read and write. But you know, the forms do seem very familiar because I grew up, you know, seeing the Chinese newspaper in the house and, you know, it was always around me. I just never was able to connect with me in a deep way. Yeah, I always felt like separated from that part of my background and yeah, it's been kind of a burden on me for a long time that I'm still trying to reconcile. Yeah, this painting is called Fetch. I recently, well, maybe not so recently now, it's been a few years but we adopted a dog and I never had a dog before growing up. So, it's kind of been an amazing experience to have a dog now, kind of late in life and that sort of inspired this painting where this character is playing Fetch with his companion here. And again, there's a broken antler, that motif of loss, love and loss, you know. And I think the color palette for this painting is especially nice. You know, it's always a completely replicate what was in my mind or what was even on my computer monitor to bring that into life but somehow with this one, it really worked well together. Yeah, so, you know, these types of forms recur a lot in my work, the kind of shifting landscape between the character's feet, kind of showing the instability of our lives or an instability that I feel as an artist. You know, being an artist, it's a very precarious existence. And these cut forms too, these cut forms with the faces inside is another motif. There's a And that sort of refers to the idea of animism or what they call Kami spirits in Shintoism. It's the idea that there's a spirit in inanimate objects, especially in nature. So, yeah, this painting kind of combines all those things. This piece here is called Nomad. And yeah, there's kind of that juxtaposition of, you know, traditional garb with crocs here on the bottom, it's got a little bit of flair which refer to some of the other motifs in my paintings. You know, again, we have that face, the Kami. We've got a tiger here and the symbol here kind of resembles king in Chinese. I also like how the tear in his fabric kind of reveals this pattern underneath that is taken from this decoration on the elephant. And again, we have some water droplets up there on the lotus, lotus leaves, lotus leaves which are hydrophobic. So, the water kind of beads up and creates these, you know, really beautiful shapes. Yeah, which is kind of, you know, again, referring to those different types of techniques. So, we have like kind of the trompe l'oeil water dots but then we also have actual splashes of water that were on the painting that dried to form these shapes here, these very interesting splatter shapes. I mean, these splatters are all completely random. Sometimes, we get these really beautiful forms I think on his tunic here. I don't know if this is a tunic but yeah, these sort of kind of marble, marbling like splotches are really interesting for me to see. Yeah, it's always surprising to see how the pigment reacts with the water and how it'll dry. This piece here is called Student. It's a very nostalgic piece. We have a vintage looking school desk and chair. This is the type of chair I used when I was in school. And we have another Chinese landscape painting here on the desk, a different type of graffiti, a very sensitive type of graffiti. Yeah, this is I would say it's more like a ermine or ferret. Some people call it a cat but this is kind of reference to a painting by Leonardo da Vinci called Lady with Ermine where she's holding the animal, the ferret like animal. Yeah, there's also like an interesting bit of texture on the leaves for the flowers, kind of glistens in the light. The boy's costume also resembles Mega Man, a game I used to play a lot when I was growing up. And yeah, the character's left-handed. I'm right-handed, so that's not a self-portrait. And here we have more sketches and color studies for the paintings in the show. Actually, these are two sketches for other paintings that aren't in the show but you find these paintings online. These were all done around the same time, around the same period. Actually, in this sketch for Nomad, you can see there's a lot of different thumbnails I had done. Actually, I haven't seen this in a while. So, yeah, there's some interesting ideas for other compositions here of the character in action. So, here we have a sculpture of mine called Sun Tarot and it's made out of wood, various types of wood. And it's based on a painting of the same name and I was able to turn it to sculpture. Someone said the flowers on the skin kind of looks like leprosy and I kind of like that response because I like that line between, beauty and something being grotesque. And it's always kind of fun to play with those opposing elements. And so, if you turn around, you can see the mirror is actually we still haven't taken off the film from the mirror because we're protecting that until the show opens. But yeah, it's not actually a card, it's a mirror, a magic mirror. And due to the thickness of the card, it actually kind of resembles a phone. So, the phone, I think, is kind of like a magic mirror. I mean, people do use it as a mirror, like they turn on the selfie camera and they, you know, check their makeup. And yeah, we get lost and absorbed into it. So, yeah, I like these. I like how the sculptures kind of continue the narrative more than the paintings do, kind of allows me to play with more ideas. And on the back of the sculpture, we're able to see my hummingbird motif as they're kind of pollinating the various flowers on her back. I think that's it.