Jesse Thomas
Super Spy Narratives: Paintings of Drawings of Prints
I have recently finished my first year of teaching Painting in the Department of Art and Design at the U of A. Prior to this, I had been teaching painting, drawing and design at Washington University in St Louis.
During my first month in Edmonton I made a set of drawings using rapidograph pens on Bristol board. They were informed first by the woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. From there, the compositions developed as places were imagined, assembled, and discovered, then populated by characters released from dreams and memory. Emergent narrative themes lean toward the cinematic, grounded in science fiction and espionage.
Each composition investigates the interior geometry of pictorial space, shaped by my experiences of architecture inside and out. I’m using this structure to build paintings with the alchemical nature of the medium in mind: pigments of animal, vegetable, and mineral origin suspended in linseed oil and refined pine sap. The process allows me the chance to go deep into the visual: finding and creating colorspace energy, looking for temperature and depth, generating a site of balance and resolution.
Super Spy Narratives: Paintings of Drawings of Prints
I have recently finished my first year of teaching Painting in the Department of Art and Design at the U of A. Prior to this, I had been teaching painting, drawing and design at Washington University in St Louis.
During my first month in Edmonton I made a set of drawings using rapidograph pens on Bristol board. They were informed first by the woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. From there, the compositions developed as places were imagined, assembled, and discovered, then populated by characters released from dreams and memory. Emergent narrative themes lean toward the cinematic, grounded in science fiction and espionage.
Each composition investigates the interior geometry of pictorial space, shaped by my experiences of architecture inside and out. I’m using this structure to build paintings with the alchemical nature of the medium in mind: pigments of animal, vegetable, and mineral origin suspended in linseed oil and refined pine sap. The process allows me the chance to go deep into the visual: finding and creating colorspace energy, looking for temperature and depth, generating a site of balance and resolution.
