Biomorphic abstractions

Over the past two years, I’ve pursued color-rich biomorphic abstraction. These carefully crafted, curvilinear forms interact in visually playful ways, sometimes portrayed against wildly gestural backgrounds. The forms are quite abstract, some seeming more animal-like, some more plant-like. I’ve rendered these compositions in acrylic paints, oil paints, or oil and cold wax. Below: Polendra, Parallel Lives, Orbus, and The Color of Void.

Why engage in fanciful biomorphic forms? Viewers are more likely to uncover (within themselves, really) meaning and interaction when the forms seem organic – but are sufficiently vaguely rendered to prevent ascribing characteristics of any particular species. The paintings are also just plain fun to observe!

Through June and July, ryan james fine arts will present several of these large-scale works at its Belltown capsule gallery at 2207 Second Ave. in Seattle’s Belltown (Omni Dental), open MWF 7:30-4; TTh 9-6.  Take advantage of Belltown's second-Friday art walk from 6-9pm on 6/13 and 7/11 -- I'll be there and would love to see you!

Why geometric abstraction?

Solo show Geometrica is on view at ryan james fine arts, Kirkland WA, 1-31 May 2025!

It’s my intense sense of individualism that leads to my focus on visual abstraction – and more specifically, to non-objective abstraction, in which there are few or no visual cues to the relationship between the visual composition and any human or physical objects in the world. I want to interpret paintings my way, and I want my viewers to interpret my pieces in their individual ways.

Geometric abstraction forms the basis of many of my compositions. Geometric shapes interact with plain or carefully mottled backgrounds. Their relative slopes, colors, and heft imply movement or stasis, balance or imbalance, and even power relationships.

Unbridled Joy

I’m especially inspired by non-objective “Suprematism” championed by Kazimir Malevich and his contemporaries in pre-Revolutionary Russia, and generally inspired by 20th-century hard-edge and color-field paintings.

Color, in each of its dimensions, is vitally important – even in its absence. I don’t rely on a generalized characterization of colors. I rely on the juxtaposition of colors and values to convey potential impact. Any color rendered in paint seems ‘warm’ to me, because of the lusciousness of solidly applied paint.

For me, straight lines convey dynamism, simply because they move (and move the eye) directly and expediently from one place to another. Vertical lines are often divisive; horizontal lines evoke the horizon – and thus should be used sparingly (if at all) in non-objective compositions. Diagonal lines move the eye across two dimensions, and are thus inherently more dynamic. I often prefer positively sloped diagonals, because they may be hopeful to any viewer accustomed to reading from left to right.

It's trite to say that circles are “perfect” in their enclosure of space, but they are. Their constant radii are comforting, as is their association with eggs and with the womb. I paint circles as enclosures – more focused on the interior than the figure.

This Place at This Time

However, sided figures – triangles, quadrilaterals, and the like -- behave like figures (actors, if you will), within a composition. They develop characteristics akin to personalities.

Enjoy the lines, bars, rectangles, triangles, circles, and arcs cavorting on color-filled -- or color-less -- grounds. Inspired by Albers, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, these compositions maximize viewers' ability to decide what the image and interactions mean to them.

Expressing the core "self"

I’ve read and been told again and again that meaningful art (music, painting, or writing) must recognize some key aspects of the artist’s being that need expression.  I find that challenging to accomplish in a form that I find visually appealing.

One possible way forward springs from my recent reading of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 2019 monograph So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch. At one point Knausgaard repeats a quote from Munch, concerning his “Frieze of Life” paintings from the 1890s (when he was in his 30s): 

“’I painted only what I remembered without adding anything to it – without the details that I no longer saw.  Hence the simplicity of the pictures – the apparent emptiness.  By painting the colours and lines and shapes I had seen in an emotional state – I wished to recapture the quivering quality of the emotional atmosphere like a phonograph.  This is how the pictures of the Frieze of Life came into being’” [Bischoff, p. 63].

In Knausgaard’s words, “he painted his memories and sought to recapture the emotions they had awakened in him at the time.  These were defining memories, or they became such when he painted them;  they were the basis of his understanding of himself, in them he could seek out what had made him who he was” [135].

“The inner world is unconveyed -- that is its nature.  The conveying of it, that is, the fiction or the story, is our way of understanding the self” 6].  In this process, one may create something that is at once extremely specific to oneself, and universal in its capture of a feeling.

I’m trying this now, in a set of six (perhaps eight) small studies on paper.  If I find any of them appealing, I’ll share them.

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Ulrich Bischoff (2016, first pub. 1988).  Edvard Munch: Images of Life and Death.  New York: Taschen.

Karl Ove Knausgaard  (2019).  So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch. New York:  Penguin Books.

"Going Home" in downtown Seattle

"Going Home," a collection of my most poignant paintings, is on display in the Seattle Municipal Tower (700 Fifth Avenue: the very tall building with a freeway ramp running through it), Thursday 30 October to Thursday 23 January.  The show is hosted by and in Seattle's Ethnic Heritage Art Gallery on the 3rd floor lobby of the building.  If you know folks who work in the Tower, please spread the word -