n organizing these paintings, I combine aspects from multiple sources -- drawings from observation, parts of reference photographs, and personal memories, in order to communicate plausible spaces and interactions between figurative, other elements, and the landscape. Figure and ground are organized with line and shape, coupled with color relationships, to build a vast space that can be viewed for its sense of simplistic realism and an organic quality of abstraction. Color is drawn from the actual hues visible in observation, and then manipulated to reveal its relationship to the space, ultimately becoming plastic in orientation, at times foreground merging with background and vice versa. In deconstructing the imagery, the focus, within the process, becomes less on the possibility of reality, however real the end product. Rather, the focus for me becomes what happens formally in the painting, the issues of composition and color. By scaling the work to an intimate size, gaps within the compositions, a missing leg or head, are filled in without the viewer realizing. I feel this method of working integrates the viewer as an active participant in the experience. Rather than just viewing the work passively, the viewer is asked to engage in the work by filtering the generalized scene through his or her own personal memories of similar events.

Born in 1972 in Jacksonville, Illinois, James Oliver currently lives and works in Pittsburg, Kansas where he teaches painting and drawing at Pittsburg State University. He received his MFA from Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, an MA from Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, Illinois, and a BFA from Denison University, Granville, Ohio.