James Dingman about his December art show : ” I’ve been experimenting with color lately!  Actually, I HAD to.  I tend to work in lots of blues – it’s my color.  But I have a commission to do and the client doesn’t like blue!  She’s more into oranges, greens and browns – earthy colors – and that’s not where I usually go.  So I did these pieces to make peace with orange.  It’s not the easiest color to work with but I came to like it very much!  The series is called ‘Orange You Glad We Met.’

While these pieces, like all of mine, were done intuitively over several sessions, I found myself drawn to a plane geometric structure.  Horizontal, vertical and circular kept creeping in and gave me a skeleton on which to hang the rest of the shapes and colors.  My titles reflect what I saw and felt while creating the pieces but that’s just my idea.  I want my work to be as much about what the viewer sees as about what I intended, so I invite anyone looking at the pieces to see them from a little distance first – glean what meaning you can from them – then step in and see what I thought in the title.  And, here’s a little tip:  your interpretation will always top mine!

The bigger piece is a mini autobiography.  It’s a snapshot of my night life over the past few months.  I had a bit of surgery earlier this year and one of the end results was a bit of insomnia.  This painting expresses that (to me, anyway).  I don’t see it as a nightmare, but rather as a time when thought runs free and ideas are put together in different ways.  Yes, there are faces and geometries and body parts in there, all intersecting in a sleepless kind of way.  As you can tell (go ahead and touch the piece!), the sandman flew over the canvas as I was working on it (I’m talking about the texture!). “