|
|
| "Some abstract artists — Mondrian is one — make entire paintings from countless small precise strokes, brushwork so detailed but so undemonstrative that you sense it rather than see it. If his compositions of plain blocks and bars feel vivacious, that’s why.
James Little does something similar with color. His new paintings are almost entirely of patterns of crisp vertical stripes and rays made vibrant by gradations of colors. Mondrian stuck to a palette of red, yellow, blue, black and white. Mr. Little seems to explore every possible variation of these. Pink soaks into lavender; electric orange slices into electric blue; cinnabar floats over gray; dark blue stains into light blue, light blue into peacock-blue-green. Each stripe becomes a self-defined spectrum, each painting a rainbow.
Such results could be just pretty; the work’s titles — “Satchmo’s Answer to Truman,” “The Marriage of Western Civilization and the Jungle” — seem designed to make sure we don’t see them that way. And we don’t. What we see, or feel, is an eye choosing, mixing and gradating color the way Mondrian applied paint: as if concentration were a form of expression, which it is"
HOLLAND COTTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES JUNE 5, 2009 "Little's paintings are not about specific, tasty hues (as with Davis and Kenneth Noland) but about how colors--ordinary, generic colors--interrelate to articulate space." Nathan Kernan, Art in America, Oct 2005,
"James Little’s paintings have soul, that is, the power to ignite the spirit. Like the best Jazz, they express powerfully distilled emotions. James Little’s paintings are original, sophisticated, and profound. They are expressionist and ceremonial in essence. They are quite distinct from earlier approaches to non-objective and hard edge painting. Little’s paintings use geometry and color in a way that reaches beyond their historical sources in Modern Art and go on to express a social and spiritual dynamic that is new to American art.
Little has immersed himself in the same tradition of painting and enriched it and expanded it with a personal vision rooted in his African American and American Indian heritage. James Little received his BFA at the Memphis College of Art and his MFA at Syracuse University in 1976. He has exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe."-James Harithas: The Station Museum | |
|
|