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Email PageHead of Girl
September 6, 2007- October 6, 2007
Reception: September 6, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
James Nelson
McKenzie Fine Art
511 W 25th StMcKenzie Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of drawings by James Nelson, opening Thursday, September 6 and running through Saturday, October 6, 2007. A reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, September 6 from 6 to 8 p.m.
This will be the second solo exhibition at McKenzie Fine Art of Nelson's drawings created on handmade Japanese paper. Nelson's previous body of work featured incredibly detailed, obsessive graphite marks which formed dense organic networks. These textured and tonal passages covered entire sheets of paper and were carefully balanced so as neither to imply figure/ground relationships nor provide differentiation from an overall harmony.
In contrast, Nelson's newest drawings are clearly representational. Done in charcoal, they convey the immediacy of that medium as well as a sense of place and atmosphere. The ability to rework, erase and blur the charcoal allows Nelson to "draw as a sculptor," as he spontaneously builds volumes and forms on the sheets of light-blue or white paper. The resulting shapes appear as knotted skeins piled in lumpy mounds or mysteriously suspended in space. These coils and volutes sometimes seem to inhabit or define landscapes, but often exist in ambiguous spaces of a slightly brooding or sinister nature. The association of the tangled, twirling masses with hair is unavoidable and viewers soon recognize that Nelson's creations are emphatically hirsute.
Nelson's inspiration and the name for this show come from the traditional title for portrait drawings of unidentified female sitters. He writes of his process:
"Traditional Head of a girl drawings -- perhaps the best loved are those of Andrea del Verrocchio -- are striking in their intimacy and sensitivity but ambiguous as to the connection between artist and subject: they beg the questions who, where, why and what kind of relationship, what passed between them? The drawings are the only evidence left behind. I do not work from a model, but make drawings that fantasize about a person unknown to me representing her from many angles: back, close-up or inside out, although never picturing a face. In the absence of specific physiological information, hair becomes an important emblem of identity, an abstract playground for expression, a fetish of desire. As in the fairy tale of Rapunzel, hair invites and seduces but also offers a resource and means of escape."
In these drawings, Nelson's former penchant for obsessive markmaking has developed into an obsessive search for a mysterious ideal. Each image is a prototype of an elusive, missing original the longing for which can only be addressed by the ongoing generative quality of the artist's imagination.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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