TERRELL JAMES: FIELD STUDIES

TERRELL JAMES

TERRELL JAMES

No. of 100

Field StudiesT E R R E L L J A M E S



Terrell James: Intimate Immensity

ALISON de LIMA GREENE

In the autumn of 1997, Terrell James laid out a group of six works on paper in a vitrine
in the back room of Houston’s Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery. Inspired in part by
the field notes and color studies of nineteen-century plein air painters, she named the
nascent series Field Studies, a title implying both the expansive spirit of exploration and
the autographic specificity of record keeping. Ranging from deep umbers and siennas
to brighter touches of green, yellow, blue, and red, these first sketches evoked random
encounters with land, sky, and sunlight. James has explained:

The Field Studies represent a sort of pun in painting. As I key into the tradition
of color note taking outdoors (in the field), the pieces convey specific colors as
they appear in nature. For example, the top four inches of Field Study No. 2 sug-
gest notations in color, hues from a meadow I have mixed based on my direct
observation. It feels like a meadow, my memory of experiencing a meadow, and
may evoke “meadow” in a collective memory as well. 1

While James’s choice of title directs attention to landscape traditions, an equally im-
portant aspect of the Field Studies is their grounding in James’s studio practice. Literally
gathered from the floor of her studio, the initial Field Studies of 1997 were her “painting
palettes,” ephemeral notations rather than finished compositions. Once they were ex-
tracted from the working environment and developed further, however, these sketches
achieved a fresh authority, signaling a profound shift in James’s approach:

I am referring to the process of painting. These works are very much quotations
from my palettes, the direct artifacts or byproducts from the act of painting…

left: Installation view of Field Studies at
The Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas, 2000

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Now flat, the marks, spills, and color patches attain a certain freedom or lack
of formal structure; the order we once expected of painting is gone. The Field
Studies broke my earlier tendency to treat a painting as a window into an illusory
three-dimensional space.2

As James recognized these complementary tendencies in the first sketches, she concen-
trated on developing the Field Studies into a significant body of intimate paintings. Work-
ing in the studio, using a synthetic vellum that offered an ideal surface for improvisation,
James exploited the semi-transparent and non-porous support as a foil to test a brush’s
touch or to try out new color harmonies. At the same time, she adopted a fixed vertical
format, limiting each sheet to 16 x 12 inches.3

In 1998 James made the Field Studies the focus of an exhibition at Devin Borden Hiram
Butler Gallery. Facing one large canvas, individual Field Studies, now framed and upright,
anchored the main wall. Two years later, James presented twenty works from the series
at The Old Jail Art Center. As documented in an installation view (frontispiece), the
Field Studies were hung in a grid, creating a powerful visual dynamic, alternating between
expansive and contracting compositions. Now spanning more than a decade, the Field
Studies have come to function as an intermittent but consistent visual diary, numbering
over 500 sheets, both reflecting and punctuating the artist’s larger body of work.
Field Study No. 3 (p. 7) is closest to the origins of this project. Like the working “palettes”
James was at first willing to discard, the paper support is not treated as a precious mate-
rial, and the oil medium is allowed to leach into the surface, creating the illusion of a sub-
strate layer. Even in this early work, however, James has set up the considered dialectic
that will define the Field Studies. The earth-toned colors and weighted forms echo the
landscape, while the insistent energy of the brushwork, highlighted by dashes of white,
attest to the pure joy and power of mark making.

James’s painterly and conceptual evolution has dictated many of the developments seen
in subsequent Field Studies. Sometimes a drawn line darts across the field or serves as a
scaffold, sometimes pale afterimages challenge the viewer’s eye, and even the occasional
collaged element is welcomed as well. While never serving as literal studies for larger,
more polished compositions, the Field Studies frequently announce new themes and con-
cerns. Indeed, James’s frame of reference expands subtly throughout the series as she
investigates new ways of considering the landscape, the body, and the mental and physi-
cal space of her studio environment. Two of her latest Field Studies (pp. 14 and 15) attest

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to James’s present occupation with high-keyed colors, while the open, floating strata of
these sheets point to her recent murals and folding screens that challenge the confines
of the planar dimension by entering into a dialogue with architecture.

The Field Studies have struck a profound chord with James’s public. Seduced by the as-
sociative notes embedded in James’s compositions, the novelist Allen R. Gee observed
in 2002, “These paintings tell us about how the volume and shades of color can affect
us, or how the act of painting itself can bring up feeling, and how warm and cool
colors inform one another, always unveiling mood and memory.”4 Fellow artists have
responded to the more formal aspects of the series, or what Sasha Dela has termed
“the sense of object-ness and materiality of the paint and the spaces which reference
landscape in very loose terms.”5 As an art historian, I find it particularly tempting to
relate the Field Studies to the notational sketches of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.
However, it is perhaps the working drawings of David Reed and Nicholas Wilder
that offer the most telling parallels. As Reed has noted of Wilder’s color studies, the
first imperative of such compositions is to decipher “which of these blues and reds
would go best with the larger patch of pale tan color at the bottom of the page.”6 For
Reed, and for James, this process is not simply a question of optics, but also a means
of creating an arena to contemplate the act of painting, making room for serendipity,
memory, and the unconscious.

Another way of considering the Field Studies is in relation to Gaston Bachelard’s con-
cept of “intimate immensity,” discussed in his 1958 essays on The Poetics of Space. For
Bachelard, intimate immensity “is the philosophical category of daydream.” He explains
further, “Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of
natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur.” 7 James invites us down a similar path, one
that combines the discipline and ambition of more than thirty years of mature studio
practice with the intuitive insight of reverie. Each Field Study is a fresh departure, intimate
evidence of James picking up a brush, probing the page, measuring the field before the
eye. Taken as a whole, the series is an astonishing testament to the immensity that can
be charted through the creative imagination.

Alison de Lima Greene
Curator of Contemporary Art & Special Projects
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
March 2010

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Endnotes
1 Unpublished statement, 2001. Courtesy of Terrell James.
2 Ibid.
3 As the series moved forward, however, James adopted a slightly larger format,
20 x 16 inches. She has explained, “I felt like I needed a bigger space for pools
of color and changes of scale in the brush work.” Interview with the artist,
March 2010.
4 Allen R. Gee, “Terrell James : Rouffignac & Field Studies,” ArtLies 37 (Winter –
Spring 2002 – 2003): 89.
5 Sasha Dela, “Interview with Terrell James,” Glasstire: Texas Visual Art Online
(December 2008): http://glasstire.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=
view&id=2971&gtsect=Articles&gtcat=Interview
6 David Reed, Rock Paper Scissors. (Cologne, Germany: Galerie Schmidt Maczollek
and Kienbaum Artists’ Books, 2009), 64.
7 Gaston Bachelard’s La poétique de l’espace was first published in 1958;
references here are taken from the 1994 edition of The Poetics of Space,
translated by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 182.

6

Field Study 3, 1997
Oil on paper
16 x 12 inches

7

Field Study 105, 2008
Oil on paper
16 x 12 inches

8

Field Study 488, 2008
Oil on paper
16 x 12 inches

9

Field Study 459, 2009
Oil on paper
20 x 16 inches

10

Field Study 468, 2008
Oil on paper
16 x 12 inches

11

Field Study 481, 2009
Oil on paper
16 x 12 inches

12

Field Study 484, 2009
Oil on paper
16 x 12 inches

13

Field Study 493, 2009
Oil on paper
16 x 12 inches

14

Field Study 502, 2009
Oil on paper
16 x 12 inches

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Field Studies Exhibitions

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2010 Terrell James: Studio Window & Field Studies, Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR.

2009 Terrell James: Announcement, Barry Whistler Gallery, Dallas, TX.

2008 Terrell James, Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, TX.

2007 Place for Two Stones, Jason McCoy Inc., New York, NY.

2005 Terrell James: New Paintings, Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, TX.

2004 The Paintings of Terrell James, Jason McCoy, Inc., New York, NY.

2003 New Paintings, Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, TX.

2002 Relay: New Paintings, Gallery at the Marfa Book Company, and open studio, Marfa, TX.

2001 New Field Studies, Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX.
Impression and Sensation: The Painting of Terrell James, Pillsbury & Peters Fine Art, Dallas, TX.

1998 Terrell James: Field Studies, Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2010 Berliner Geschichten: Terrell James, Bo Joseph, Adam Raymont, Barry Whistler Gallery, Dallas, TX.

2006 Out of Abstraction, Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, TX.
Gallery Artists, Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX.

2004 Texas Vision: The Barrett Collection, Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.
Drawing, Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX.

2003 Joining/Collage, Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX.
A Sense of Place, Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, TX.

2002 Gallery Artists, Pillsbury Peters Fine Art, Dallas, TX.
DiverseWorks, Small Projects Gallery, Houston, TX.

2001 Sublime: the Landscape Re-Envisioned, Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, TX.

2000 Gallery Artists, Pillsbury Peters Fine Arts, Dallas, TX.
Leandro Erlich, Joseph Havel, Terrell James, Dean Ruck, Old Jail Art Center, Albany, TX.

1999 Between Image and Object, Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, TX.

1998 Terrell James: Field Studies, Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX.

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Half-title page image :
Field Study 3, 1997
Oil on paper
16 x 12 inches

Page 17 image:
Terrell James studio, Berlin, 2009
Photo: Bo Joseph

All works copyright © 2010 Terrell James. All rights reserved.
Essay copyright © 2010 Alison de Lima Greene. All rights reserved.
Design: Bo Joseph
Printing: Project, Long Island City