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Living with Majesty

5/20/2020

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Hart James

Behind Closed Doors: Infinity

A Virtual Mini-Exhibition of New Works
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Hart James seeks to bring the infinite quality of nature to form on the canvas.

Cezanne said, ‘Nature is on the inside.” By finding the nature within us, we are able to maintain our balance. Mandela said that the infinite is within us.

The past two months have challenged and strengthened the importance of this act.

James’ work speaks of the energy of nature—the current of the water, the flow of the air over us, and the rock formations that form the foundation under our feet. Using oil, and charcoal, every painting is an attempt to reunite with an existence symbiotic with the natural world

Oil and Charcoal on Canvas

Living with Majesty

Harry Harvey Gallery

Harris Harvey Gallery is the new face of Lisa Harris Gallery (established 1984) and a member of the Seattle Art Dealer's Association. Continuing the tradition of Lisa Harris Gallery, Harris Harvey Gallery represents contemporary artists based on the West Coast - with particular emphasis on the Pacific Northwest. Specializing in landscape, figurative, narrative, and abstract art in a wide variety of media, Harris Harvey Gallery mounts rotating exhibitions and participates in the monthly First Thursday Art Walk in Downtown Seattle.
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Herman Hesse on Trees

5/10/2020

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkQ-6LvbwdI&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2zPjCsyWKJ87ahkdyAmg3nDjkIq-SqGMDXpMKalhioe8LAF0--Kdj1W5k
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the Leonor R. Fuller Gallery at SPSCC - Virtual Show

4/1/2020

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Hart James opens her studio to visit with Gallerist Sean Barnes for the 2020 Juror's Invitational Exhibition.
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Hart James: a Layering of existences Imbued With Intense Energy

3/24/2020

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Oly Arts

Hart James: a Layering of existences Imbued With Intense Energy


PUBLISHED ON MARCH 20, 2020
By Alec Clayton
Hart James is quickly becoming one of the Olympia area’s most beloved visual artists. People who have not seen her paintings should do so.

“Life is a layering of existences. Each layer is imbued with intense energy,” James explains. “My work speaks of this energy and these layers; the current of the water, the flow of the air, the rock formations that form the foundation under our feet and the movement of those foundations, the layers of time in each form. The natural world is very simply alive and very complex. It is as much a part of us as our circulatory system. This fact is nothing to be taken for granted.”

James grew up on a farm, spending her days wandering 1,500 acres of nature. Observing — always observing — studying the beauty, the transience, the processes and cycles, the details of construction in nature. She wandered the family farm and all of the adjoining farms of the neighbors.

In these surroundings, James became attuned to the natural world in a way that she says seems “more connected to earlier societies, than with our present day world.” She goes on to say that she “intuited natural processes that are just now being ‘discovered’ by modern scientists.” She came to understand the infinity of space, the insignificance of man, the transient nature of life, and the omnipotent power of the life force of nature — all by the age of ten. All of this informs her life today.
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James Studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the San Francisco Art Institute, with Anne Truitt, Vera Berdich and Ed Pashcke, among others, and studied art history and biology at Northwestern. She has attended artist residencies across the country, including Oxbow, Morris Graves Foundation, and Seaside. In 2017, she was awarded a fellowship to attend Vermont Studio Residency.

Locally, James has had solo exhibitions at All Sorts Gallery and the Washington Center for the Performing Arts, and has been in many of the annual juried exhibitions at the Leonor R. Fuller Gallery at South Puget Sound Community College (SPSCC) and Tacoma Community College. She is among a handful of artists chosen to be in the Juror’s Invitational at SPSCC, featuring the best artists from this year’s juried exhibition. She is currently represented by Harris Harvey Gallery in Seattle, Smith&Vallee Gallery in Edison and Waterworks Gallery in Friday Harbor.

James’ paintings are slightly abstracted landscapes in oil and charcoal, quite frequently picturing flowing rivers and mountains. There is rock-hard solidity to her paintings that brings to mind Cézanne’s statement that he wanted to make impressionism into “something solid and durable, like the art of museums.”
Fellow landscape artist Mary McCann says of James’s painting, “I often think about the validity of landscape painting. What more can be said that hasn’t already been addressed? The answer to that question becomes a moot point when I see work by an artist that demands that the viewer look again. Hart James is such an artist.”

McCann continued, “Yes, she skillfully uses paint and form to depict scenes that are instantly recognizable. But to me, her work is not really about the landscape but about the emotional and mystical power it has over all of us. If an artist is successful at raising the bar above and beyond the landscape itself, then the emotional impact seeps in. Hart is making that happen in her beautiful paintings.”

Great painting is always about more than the subject. A photograph or our own eyes out in nature can show us the beauty and majesty of the natural world. Great art must do more than that. Be it landscape or the human figure or arrangements of pure form, it must show us the beauty and majesty of paint applied to canvas, the solidity and unity and variety of color, shape and mark-making. Hart James does this.

Hart was scheduled to show her work at Olympia Arts Walk April 24-25, 2020. The event was cancelled in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
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Visit Online
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at Harris Harvey Gallery, 1915 First Avenue,   Seattle, WA

11/30/2019

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Vermont Studio Center Video

9/3/2018

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with the kind help of Siddharth Choudhary.
this video is an active painting.
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Seattle Show, August 2018

9/3/2018

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Allsorts Gallery Opening—April 16th, 2018

4/16/2018

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Hart James is an ambitious artist in our midst. Trained as a horticulturalist, James made her living in the nursery and garden-design business, but in recent years she’s become a painter. Every year her work gets stronger, and at this point she’s hitting a stride you’d do well to witness, with a show titled ZEN at Allsorts Gallery. These are new works since James’ winter residency at the Vermont Studio School, not seen before in the Pacific Northwest - expressionist landscape paintings displaying a steely strength and power. The color is wintry, and the marks are decisive and energetic. The works are mostly unframed, and may be bought quickly. Get there early.

Allsorts Gallery is itself a very original revolving pop-up gallery in the Charters/Serembe household at 2306 Capitol Way S. At the reception there are always ridiculously good eats.

Reception April 22, Earth Day, 4-6 if I remember right.

Gallery also open on Artswalk weekend, Friday April 27 and Saturday April 28, from 5-7, and on April 19, 20 and 21.

B there or B square.         
Susan Christian
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Award-Winning Artists at SPSCC Invitational Exhibition

4/16/2018

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Award-Winning Artists at SPSCC Invitational Exhibition

Published on March 27, 2018
by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS

An invitational exhibition is something new and exciting for the gallery at South Puget Sound Community College. Juror Amy McBride invited 10 award-winning artists from the 2017 Southwest Washington Juried Exhibition to display their best works.

A few examples from the 10 artists are very intriguing.

Hart James, for example, fills an entire gallery wall with a montage of paintings of forests. They’re like paintings in an 18th century museum wherein paintings were stacked floor to ceiling, but in this instance they are thematically and stylistically similar and color coordinated. Each painting can stand on its own, and the entire grouping works as a single piece. Taken as a whole, it is a prime example of something that is essential to most good art, the principal of variety within unity.

Hart paints trees. In a written statement, she says, “I paint their stand against time … I paint the energy that they gift us … I paint the spiritual energy with which they endow us.”

Her trees are seen up close as a tangle of harsh, angular limbs dividing areas of green leaves and pale blue sky into abstract patterns painted with heavy dashes of color. One painting left of center shows more sky than the others and thus becomes a focal point. The painting in the far-left upper corner is more abstract and painted with different kinds of brushstrokes. Skip over this one to the next one to the right, and you’ll see that it is also almost completely abstract, but the color and painting style is more in keeping with the rest, thus serving as a bridge. It is these contrasts within the harmonious whole that make this group of paintings so intriguing — that and Hart’s lush paint application.

Next, Evan Clayton Hoback’s work is fascinating. For years, Horback has been celebrated for his collages on old book covers, and there are a few of those in this show, but he has branched out into new directions with works that are less illustration and more sculptural. There is one that is a heavy book displayed on a pedestal. It appears to have been made from cutting old books into strips and gluing them together and covering them with something that looks like sand mixed in some kind of resin. Buried in the resinous surface is a photo of a man dressed all in orange and floating (perhaps drowning) in blue water. Called “Survival in the Age of Orange,” this piece looks ancient and eerie.

Other works which are newer are wall sculptures made of pages from magazines that Horback has crumpled into balls and arranged in patterns. One appears to be a frame for a circular mirror on the wall, but there is no mirror.

Sculptor Bernie Bleha has a group of seven colorful towers stacked just inside the gallery door and another group of 11 such towers in front of the only window in the gallery. They are colorful and playful and dominated by almost blindingly hot red, orange and purple.

CJ Swanson has seven small paintings in swirling abstract patterns on wood panels. The most interesting of these are on stacked wood blocks.

There are seven fantasy paintings of elephants and rhinos by Jason Sobottka. See if you can find the almost hidden Dumbo and Horton from Horton Hears a Who.

Also showing are works by Melissa Barnes, Charles Eklund, Doyle Fanning, Neil Peck, and Rebecca Smurr.
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March 26th, 2018

3/26/2018

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Juror’s Invitational, Minnaert Gallery, SPSCC, Olympia, WA.

Juror: Amy McBride, Tacoma Art Museum  - Olympia, WA.
March 19-April 20, 2018

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    Hart James, a visual artist in Olympia, WA

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Hart James
(859) 333-7961 /
hart@hartjames.com
PO Box 7112 / Olympia, WA 98507
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