“a Day at the Beach” 30×48 $1250

James Dingman – July 2017

“This month I have 3 new pieces on Canvas.  I’ve been working on smaller pieces on paper for 3 months.  It was a hiatus I needed to take from canvas because my work had become kinda stale (at least, to me!).  The break was energizing and I came back to canvas with new ideas and materials.

This month I had a curvy, primitive hill scape in my mine and it is expressed in all three pieces.  The palettes and feel are all different, though.  Oh, and each of these was painted over an existing ‘failed’ piece.  I work in layers and the more, (usually) the better – so the bad paintings underneath just became a lower layer as I added more and more on top.

‘Shout Hallelujah’ Is all about joy. I see it being shouted from the hilltops in this piece.  I try to find some peaceful space in all my work, a simple plane of color to contrast with the chaos of the rest of the piece.  Here, it is red.  Most don’t think of red as a peaceful color, but I do.  To me it says, ‘I am at peace with passion and being alive.’

‘Wave’ almost was untitled.  But, again, the curving spaces begged to be called a wave.  I love the way orange can blend into pink through buff and/or white – and that’s what formed the background of this piece.  I wanted to demonstrate that and punctuate it with a lot of energy and motion. Hence all of the scratching and uncovering and slashes of lines.

‘A Day at the Beach’ developed as all my work does:  layer after layer after layer.  It is one, though, that I needed to simplify in the final layers.  The depth of the piece results largely from covering up some of what Is below, putting something over it.  It’s been very hot in Las Vegas this month and I wanted to suggest warm sea breezes and gentle sun . .  .and the suggestion of a woman leaving after a day of sunning.

    “wave” 30×40 $1000