James Harvey, visual artist/ artista visual, & art classes/clases de arte.

Artist's Statement
When I work in a series it is to repeatedly test my motives and responses with one particular structure or device. The elements that begin to come to life appear to have grown there or somehow appear self-determined. The still life is just an excuse; I'm trying to put myself within it and to be coherent. I don't have a destructive spirit; I'm just stirring things up.

Using simple every day objects I can concentrate on my techniques and visual devices to construct my images. By drawing or painting directly on the canvas, I overlap my images, either by painting over them, sewing other pieces of canvas over them (in free form shapes that are filled with cotton). The bulges that appear are made by chance, I observe them until images appear. A paint stroke or a position of one of the bulges can completely change the sense of my painting.

What interests me in still life is to work with it as organic material, to feel it as pure material. These new surfaces are then painted over with new images, creating a depth and excited visual surface that is almost like sculpture - and when viewed from the sides, the image has an abstract or cubist feeling to them.

By trying different renderings I can get to the saturation of the still life. Each piece leads me to a new bit of knowledge, a slight expansion of my vocabulary, one stage in the development of a personal philosophy.