Mountain Works

Enter Gallery

J. Lee Thomason
Angel Fire, New Mexico

Mountain Works World Premiere Opening, The Concept Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee, October 16, 2009

J. Lee Thomason ~ concept@jleethomason.com

575 ~ 377 ~ 1009

Artist's Statement:

Having experienced reality as a loose and sometimes fleeting coherence to a singularity, sometimes colored by dense ethereal phantom like insistences, I strive in my pictorial representations to capture this ambivalence, the fleeting suggestions of parallel worlds coloring the moment. Drawing in this way is improvisational, a song of implied movement that the printed word and the necessity of complicated syllabic notations are strained to hold.

And this quality is most closely held to the life of the face framed in nature, nuanced whether by the tilted eye brow, the barely repressed smirk, a transcendent gleam of the eye or some other act of light expression like broken shards of the liquid crystal of being. It is a language that comes best freed of the discipline of study. Implied in cubism, surrealism and impressionism, it is the engagement of a moment that enfolds these and other ways of looking into the shimmering affable lunacy of meaning. If this practice, rooted in spirit to both the Dionysian and the Hermetic, could denote a movement of perception, the movement would be of the attempts of mind to delineate the atavistic, lucent and emergent qualities of the human encounter with the complex forms of human life which like one's awareness have sprung fully formed and animated out of the ever darkening anarchic void.

In this way the act of drawing becomes an ongoing general philosophical dialog born of an impulse attempting to suggest things crucial to experience that exist beyond the domain of words. I strive to create a drawing both beyond and short of the symbolic then. I seek a communication that comes as easily as speaking or physical expression yet has no anchor in time.