Artists run the gamut in terms of style, approach, and output. There are those who suffer to produce work while others create with relative ease. And then there are those who gush with creativity, ideas spilling from their minds like blood rushes to the heart. James Jean is this type of artist. Born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1979, James was raised in New Jersey and pursued his art education at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Upon graduating, he began work as a commercial artist, producing art and illustration for a varied group of clients — Rolling Stone, The New York Times, ESPN, Atlantic Records, Prada. But what he became best known for was his Eisner and Harvey Award-winning cover work for DC Comics’ Fables series. In recent years, however, James has begun looking inward for inspiration—composing large-scale paintings and works on paper intended for gallery audiences. His debut solo show, an exhibition titled “Fledgling,” opens in January of 2009 at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York. James took a break from painting to talk about his work. Here’s how our conversation played out.
What first attracted you to the idea of becoming an artist? And when did you know it was something you’d pursue as a career?
I always drew as a child. I always felt compelled to make pictures—there was no other alternative but to be true to myself.
Remaining progressive as an artist seems to always be at the forefront of your thoughts. How do you know when it’s time to try something different with your work?
I have an aversion to stagnancy. Making images is a kind of calculated risk, and I hate to repeat myself. With each new picture, I hope that I’m progressing towards some kind of sublimity in the orchestration of elements and ideas.
Progression can be such a tricky thing to objectively measure. Do you think you’ll know when you’ve reached this sublimity?
I know that the work will always be imperfect. But despite that foreknowledge, I continue to make work. From the decay of reason emerges the beauty of dreams.
As an artist, ideas are really your most important commodity. How do you organize and catalog ideas for paintings?
I don’t really have a system or catalog for ideas. I keep some thumbnails in my sketchbooks, but they rarely graduate into fully realized works. For me, ideas come about from a set of circumstances, a matrix of rules. The solution, or great idea, comes about by playing with the physics and rules of the world that I’m creating. If I know the motivations of my characters, and if I try to understand the different worlds in which they inhabit, I can set them free and watch them create their own stories. It’s like smashing matter together and analyzing the remains. In that way, I don’t have to rely on a backlog of ideas—I try to execute the work as soon as I finish the blueprints.
That’s interesting. What type of immediacy is attached to this process then? For example, once you have an idea for say, a painting, does it need to be painted in a single sitting?
My images and ideas are transcribed quickly in sketch form, but the process of painting is much more methodical. I spend most of my time trying to recapture the initial energy of the original sketch. Usually, I’ll have the sketch blown up to the same size as my painting so that I can refer to it constantly as I paint. But that comes from years of creating commercial art. As I continue to paint for myself, the painting process will become condensed.
I’m also interested in what you’ve referred to as a “matrix of rules” pertaining to how your creative ideas come about. Can you explain what you mean by this?
Once you put anything within the boundaries of a picture, you start to create relationships. Scale, color, perspective, texture—your mind starts making connections between these qualifications. Once you have characters in a space, they intensity of the relationships becomes very literal. I try to orchestrate these relationships so that they are ambigious yet believable. A good way to pull that off is to understand “the rules” that I’ve created in the picture. Once you create an action—say if a character is in repose or if that particular part of the composition is in darkness—then there must be an opposing force to have put that character in that position or to have cast that park of the picture in shadow. I draw this world until it reaches a kind of balance, until each action is accounted for in some way.
You have a solo exhibition coming up in January 2009 at Jonathan Levine gallery. Can you tell me a little bit about the work you’ll be showing and how the idea for the exhibition came about?
The title of the show is “Fledgling.” The work will consist of some large paintings and works on paper. I already released a few images of paintings that will be in the show on my website, but there are more ambitious and elaborate paintings that will stay hidden until January 2009.
Is the title symbolic—a reference to your inauguration into the gallery world?
Sure… the work is fledgling itself. It’s a slight departure from what I’m used to making. I hope it will be a good beginning.
With your background primarily in commercial art, this transition to the gallery is new ground. Can you tell me what type of changes you’ve had to make in your creative process, if any? And have you enjoyed this new direction so far?
While I was illustrating for the magazine and advertising world, I was still producing personal work, but in a very limited basis. In a sense, it was easy to avoid creating my own work and concentrate on assignments—I was constantly creating work, but the motivation is completely different. I almost feel guilty because as a painter, I’m purely responsible for the paintings—it’s a very selfish enterprise.
Decades from now, when people look back on your body of work, what do you hope they take away from the experience?
At the heart of my work is a sense of compassion conveyed through carefully observed moments. I hope the accumulation of my work over the years will impart some kind of clarity in the fundamental act of transcribing our memories, dreams, and aspirations on paper.
Noran Bakrie
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