Jim Phalen
EXCERPT
September 7-30, 2006
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 7, 5:30-7:30 PM
Dolby Chadwick Gallery is proud to announce the upcoming exhibit, Excerpt by Jim Phalen. This new body of work continues Phalen’s interest in still life and ideas of placement, subject and time inherent to it. The subject matter of these paintings is both natural and commodified, elevating the common to the uncommon. Phalen always works from the model and uses careful extended observation to depict the subject matter in the most believable light. The realism is undermined by the contrived placement of the objects, creating an uneasy alliance between the believable renderings and the highly ordered nature of their arrangement. Paintings are created over several months and objects are added or subtracted based on how they seem to coexist. Phalen’s paintings have no predetermined compositional plan, but rather like a collage in which the pieces form the whole they are about unrelated things that are forced together. Writes Phalen, “I am interested in continuing and contributing to the rich tradition of the still life. Painting perceptually is a prolonged engagement, taking weeks if not months to complete while nature and time continue undated and indifferent. In the still life, I seek to freeze time where things remain still, witnessed and observed slowly, to be re-seen and re-ordered through color and substance into a painting.”
Jim Phalen was born in 1957 in Phoenix, Arizona. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980 and received his MFA from the University of New Mexico in 1986. His work has been shown in museums through out the county, including the Frye Museum in Seattle, the Bellevue Art Museum in Bellevue, Washington and the Bowdoin College Art Museum in Brunswick, Maine.