Hello dear friends and welcome new subscribers!
This issue we catch up with James K-M, and his new work, completed at summer’s end. Those of you who’ve been following along may recall I was helping with some of this painting over the past year. Now that it’s finished, I’m excited to share his announcement with you.
New Work
by James K-M
I have just completed this year-long project entitled The 14 Numbers, a series of 14 abstract, floor-standing sculptures.
The series is assembled from 4,732 hand-painted 47cm pieces of fibreglass rebar. The colour palette is 14 colours for both rebar and the 14 cube constructions they fill. The cubes become hypothetical vortexes that can sustain a weight of intensity; physical, metaphysical, and pataphysical.
I am contemplating a historical juxtaposition to this work with Mondrian and Mantegna’s 1480 painting Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. See here:
I also recently completed 14 wall paintings which I exhibited in 2025 at ArtSpring Gallery, Salt Spring Island. The series is entitled The Silent Table, each 30” x 30”, latex and burlap on plywood, 2024. It includes 2,366 hand-wrapped with burlap, plywood circles glued to painted burlap on plywood board.
In each work there is always one diagonal row of colour that matches the background colour, to suggest a middle ground that transitions each work from figure to ground, and hypothetically beyond. All works in each series are identical except for their backgrounds.
Statement: The Pataphysics of Geometry
1) The idea is to create a non-literal measured geometric abstraction that incorporates its own ruin, or wound, or window-through. I work from an intuitive, indirect impulse, leading to a contemporary ritualization of creativity, and I like the idea of collecting ignorance for self-discovery. Without this impulse I wait.
2) Whether making sculptures or painting on animal skulls, plywood, or archaeological-like forms, my purpose is to artistically juxtapose the ancient and contemporary, to retrieve and retain the sculptural and pictographic, and to aspire regressively to the one-dimensional. This is not formalist or conceptual, because out of extremely objective systemization can come extreme subjectivity. Like an activated sequence of veils, there are many ways through, to arrive at one objective place of poetic totality, that we may sense but never see or name. This could be an analogy for the contemporary co-existing with the ancient. Without the ancient objective, the contemporary subjective has no purpose. It’s the same in art. Without the hidden ground, the figurative, whether representational or abstract has no reason for being, and we will sense that the art work is unresolved, but may not know why. At the same time, the unresolved is distinct from the unknown, yet interchangeable, like figure and ground. This is the non-rational and unpredictable that keeps us alert.
3) A question I ask myself is how does one prepare for transition? Only by cultivating one’s own patterns of abstract interconnectedness.
Quotes
Out of extremely objective systemization comes extreme subjectivity. ~ Bill Jeffries, SFU Gallery Curator, writing about my paintings on plywood
It is this limitless objectivity, refusing any kind of meddling in an alien unity, that strikes people as so offensive and comical in Cézanne’s portraits.~ Rainer Maria Rilke
The making of meaning is a fundamentally social act. ~ Nicholas Baume
And how does this art of decoration differ from the tattoo? Or is this the etymology of tattooing? Of course the paint makes it possible to see the bones as sculptural artifacts instead of as old bones once living. They have new life as retrieved clichés–now archetypal. ~ Eric McLuhan, 2012, writing about my paintings on animal bones
Thanks to James for this guest article. You can find more on his artwork at his ongoing site: jameskm.wordpress.com Artwork Photos by James K-M; Mantegna image is public domain, Mondrian image from Guggenheim.org
I’ll be posting another article very soon - there’s so much more to tell you about.
Thanks so much for your kind attention to my writing. It means the world to me to be able to share these inside thoughts with you.
Spectacular to see! A tremendous amount of creativity and work to bring these into being. Please congratulate James. Thank you for sharing the images with me. Gratitude. Roberta