Drawing-Painting, Painting-Drawing 2019

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Drawing-Painting
Painting-Drawing
Terrell James

Cameron Armstrong

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Drawing-Painting, Painting-Drawing

Drawing-Painting, Painting-Drawing:
Terrell James

Cameron Armstrong

Terrell James’ decades-long pursuit of the mutable

and allusive in perception, and of memory’s

persistence in restructuring it, has brought forth a

visionary field. Exploring her paintings, viewers

experience a braiding-together of immediate

perception with its mental traces. Recording fresh

images and afterimages, and also memory’s

revisions, mental palimpsests restructure visual

experience from within. The eyes’ gestures of Between Twins

searching and defining, unmoored from stable themes, reach out in counterpoint to seek visual

stability. James’ imagery, impermanent, unfolds in quiet dramas of recognition and remembrance -

layered, complex, and ever in reconstruction. Innocent, direct encounters with this work can suffer

resistance. The viewer’s eye might be confused by indeterminate meanings. Judgements can

stumble. Psychological baggage, prompted unexpectedly, can inspire feelings of self-consciousness

and overexposure. And one’s personal need to privilege one view over another might be frustrated

by artwork that delivers questions, rather than answers. Finally, a work might be “difficult” just

based upon material factors:

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Drawing-Painting, Painting-Drawing

unusual textures, colors or their juxtapositions. No doubt there are as many difficulties as there are
viewers. But there’s a different way to enter James’ painted visions, and not through the paintings
themselves. Witnessing her voice as it emerges from within another practice can offer solid clues.
As an example, in mid 2019 James completed a number of drawings in her Stone Papers series,
rendered on hard, smooth-surfaced sheets of calcium carbonate (similar to chalk). With varying,
sometimes jagged or looping strokes, they elaborate a pictorial geography ranging from chiseled
cliffs to line-roped clouds. From a place just beyond depiction, they offer an education in both her
painting, and our seeing.

The Stone Papers drawing Displacement 1 (2019), illustrates how James’ linear and painterly
impulses can complement each other. Here, inscribed upon cascading scrims of translucent ink, line-
chiseled ledges push leftward from the picture’s center, to ride up over a semi-transparent, wheel-
like volume rendered in white-ish wash – binding it, pressing into and puncturing it, and challenging
its claim on the foreground. In this evocation of planes, hollows and (suspected) openings we can
see how the artist securely launches subtle forms into bold imaginative terrains. Built up of clues
and networks of clues, these cliffs, clefts and blockish shapes temptingly suggest the comfort of
recognition. Following James’ clues, the eyes can find readable footholds, even as – literally glance
by glance - new possibilities emerge from within the work.

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Another of the Stone Papers, Threads 5

(2019), points in a different direction.

Boldly modeled, and rope-bound with

expressive, tightly controlled skeins of

ink, it demonstrates James’ sure touch

with pictorial space. A first reading might

be drawn to the tan-hued body floating

up into the drawing’s center. It seems

doll like, with gray putty shadows falling

upon the chalky ground behind and

below it, seeming to buoy it upward. That

chalky expanse – like the floor of a bull

ring – extends upward from the bottom,

breaking like a wave upon the sandy,

beach like band at top. This story might

continue, certainly, but there are also

other possibilities. For instance, the grey-

green shape sprawling or lolling

luxuriously at bottom – could it really

have limbs, goggles and a mouth? It

suggests a cartoon figure or some sort of

vegetable. Therefore: super-hero, or Threads 5
potato man? And is it tugging at the

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floating creature above - which may suddenly come to resemble an irregular, runaway balloon? Or is
that thing really a thick-muscled baseball player, striding across a chalky infield? It seems that any
recognition, of any thing, is undermined. Indeed, for James, commitment to form does not deliver
stable readings, but rather sets new stages upon which ambiguities can play. Within this piece, as
with Displacement #1, premature meanings are often pushed aside by shifting perspectives and
emergent images.

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Drawing-Painting, Painting-Drawing

Moving to canvas, James’ brush has broad scope for a twisted ventriloquy of pen and ink. Rising up
from within, or cutting across – sometimes as sharp, furrowed creases and sometimes like winding
ribbons – her twisting lines can seem a kind of stitching, as if sewing pictures together. For the
viewer, they can serve as mental hand-holds by which to climb into the artist’s vision, like a climber’s
roped traverse across steep cliffs. Retinue (2017) shows how this “drawing-painting” can work, with
dark, sinuous lines carving out solid forms, and also history. Moore’s elephants, Matisse’s backs and
Guston’s late cartoons come to mind, and there is certainly more. But though James’ practice is
nothing if not erudite, here her lines are untethered from strict reference: this is a loose, open
improvisation. In perception, these marks are as quirkily unpredictable as they must have been in
their making. Their sometimes rich but, just as often, washed-out-gestures foreshorten and rotate
the work’s shoulder-y, vertebral mass, which are nonetheless a stable scaffold from which to brave
the dynamism of Retinue’s drama. Perhaps for most viewers, the multiple torso-shapes of the
central frieze can at first push strongly forward – even as they’re challenged by new narratives.
Drawn rightward from center left, the eyes are lured by sensuous, billowing clouds of rosey pinks,
reds and blues and then spurred across span after span of bridge-like arches. But there’s more, as
different visions of a jumping dog, a monstrous jaw, an arm with grasping hand, and a caricatured
head suggest new foregrounds even as they disrupt chances of finding a readable imagery.
Searching for images and frustrated by indirection, we chase after the artist’s hand as it moves
across the canvas, back and forth. The breaking-up of solid shapes (recovered in other narratives),
the interrogation of seeing’s truths (and the eyes’ illusions) anchors comprehension not in the
expected, but in the unexpected. This is not a work from which to turn away for moments of
personal reflection; its seeing is in itself a kind of introspection. And also, as always with James,
there’s the promise of what next might appear from the artist’s hand - and what’s next after that - as
one reaches from one visual hand-hold to the next.

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Eloquent in both drawings and paintings, James’ unmistakable hand temptingly suggests that
decoding the artist’s markings might be possible. However, her complication of figure and ground
pushes back against notions of grammar. James’ manner is not autographic in any simple sense:
though her hand is characteristic, her figuration is determinedly fugitive. Its zig-zag moves through
perception foreclose the easy stability required for acts of naming and identifying. Pushing both
toward readable images, and assuring their disintegration, she might seem in pursuit of imagery’s

defeat. Yet her pictures suggest meaning as
certainly as they trail dissolution. Their
possibilities ultimately propose that human
understanding, writ large or small, is in itself a
creative project, turning ever-inward and -
outward in its incessant search for meaning and
order.

With the mind as its venue, James’s work joins in

dialogue with traditions outside of art. Her offer

of escape from mental rigidity, and from impulses

to judge and attach, recalls aspects of

philosophies both East and West. For instance,

there are parallels to western Phenomenology,

Shells on the Moon and also to certain strains of Buddhism. For a
millenium, students of Zen’s senior Soto lineage

have sought liberation from the destructive habits of judging and attachment (and other things)

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through extended meditation. After days and weeks spent “facing the wall” they may be able to
release these impulses through a circular process of refusal, likened to the grinding out of raised
figures from a hard plaque. Their disappearance leaves behind a polished, purified “bright mirror of
the mind,” in which “things as it is” can accurately be perceived. This is not so different from the
effect of circularity in James’ works. After following her hand through turn-after-turn, the viewer can
feel a radical erosion of the power to determine meaning. But this is not emptiness, for from
imagery’s exhaustion there can arise another purified vision, seeing color simply as color, and line
simply as line: the view in the bright mirror. Analogously, Phenomenologists including Edmund
Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty pursued the “thing-in-itself” by rigorous intellection. Husserl is
credited with inventing a conceptual path to suspending judgement, and a doctrine by which to
grasp what lies beyond human projections. Merleau-Ponty’s poetic ruminations disclosed the
fallacies of “objective” perception, instead grounding it in the mind’s own visionary gestures. In
these and other traditions, we find subject and object understood to be open, gestural constructions
of the mind, and not closed, preconditioned figures. James, too, posits experience as an insatiable
creature of the self, dedicated to ever new forms and narratives. Her raveled and unraveling lines,
her clouds, cliffs, and mirages, and her irresistibly sensual colors construct a machinery for pushing
depiction far beyond its limits – where the mind can see anew. Beyond any of the usual expectations
about art, or its conventional certainties, her work opens the eyes to untethered explorations, and to
the recovery and rediscovery of vision itself.

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Terrell James draws, paints and lives in Houston, Texas. Her work has been exhibited extensively, nationally and
internationally, and is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide. Please see www .
terrelljames . com for more information.

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