The project is inventive and inspiring, but its real depth comes from the quality of his work – his fabulous sense of color, his gestural but articulate brush strokes... His paintings are such a pleasure to look at: as visually and emotionally engaging as the project is conceptually intriguing.
- Susan Dodge Peters, Education Director, Memorial Art Gallery
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THE PAINTINGS Paintings are the heart and soul as well as the bread and butter of my art tours. I trade them for room and board, and in the process of making them I establish a lively sense of connection to a changing array of people and places. They give me a sense of belonging that helps me to survive emotionally. During 12 tours and a total of 10 months on the road, I have completed over 500 small-panel oil paintings (approx. 6" x 9"). Each one reflects the time, place and circumstances of its creation, a step along the journey (see more below...). OTHER VISUALS For my Road Artist presentatins, sketches, diagrams, maps, and photographs from the tours complement the painting imagery and provide visual variety. At left is a portion of a photograph taken through my rear view mirror, 6000 miles into my first art tour (see more...). |
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The tour paintings are part of a wide-ranging visual conversation - among themselves, with art history and with the visual environments they depict.
With some exceptions, I do not seek out spectacular postcard views to paint but, rather, make art from my immediate surroundings, the personal worlds my hosts have invited me into.
Shown below are several examples of the paintings done on tour. The captions contain commentary (sometimes simply excerpts from my travel journals), to give a sense of context . For more painting images, please see the portfolios and the news/updates section at www.jimmott.com.
At right is a detail from one of the Itinerant Artist Project paintings, to give a better idea of the technique and the texture.
"What impressed me was that Jim walked in and immediately did a great painting. I never had such an appreciation of a Chicago alley as after I looked at his painting. He makes things beautiful that you might not have otherwise thought of that way."
- Colette Novich, host, Chicago
There are certain rare days on tour when everything comes together, and I find myself finishing not one or two but five or even six paintings, most of them pretty good. These are two of five paintings done on my second day in Salt Lake City.
Edge of the City turned out to be my favorite painting from the 2007 tour. It successfully incorporates more color than I usually put into night scenes. I was drawn to the setting partly for its nostalgic echo of the barrios I'd known growing up in Tucson. And in the night air of Salt Lake City I felt an unusual serenity laced with exuberance; this composition gave me a way to express some of that.
I'd finished painting Alta a few hours earlier, sitting in my car after hiking up to a small alpine lake for a dip. When a snowboarder sauntered by to check out my progress, I expected he might say, "hey, dude, not bad," which was more or less how it went. But after I'd briefly explained my project he confounded all expectations by saying, "Rockwell Kent did something like that. Do you know about him?"
The Irma Grill, in Cody, Wyoming, is the first place I ever tried to barter art for a meal. In the first six art tours I hadn't even considered spontaneous bartering after one pitiful, failed attempt to get lodging the first week. In general, my room and board are arranged in advance. My hosts usually keep me well fed and let me pack a lunch for the road.
Bartering is not an easy thing for me, but circumstances had driven me to try it on the 2007 tour. Circumstances and a growing reluctance to use money for anything except gas while itinerating. And a small sense of adventure.
By Cody I had some successful bartering behind me: trading my landscape cards and prints for lodging at Yellowstone; for museum admission in Bozeman; and of course for the speeding ticket in Missoula. But it still wasn't easy, especially walking my scruffy self through the unexpectedly upscale dining room of the Irma, toward a very pretty, fancy dressed head waitress with a highly unsympathetic smirk on her face.
Stone House, Decorah, Iowa.
My host, Adrian, was a retired school teacher, general handyman and dreamer. He had bought this estate, complete with an old slaughterhouse, a gutted stone inn and a limestone quarry with plans to turn it into a functioning art colony.
For a few years he'd lived with his wife and son in a cluster of rooms in the slaughterhouse, with a tarp over the roof and other makeshift arrangements, while he puttered around, always starting the next section of renovation before finishing the last.
The whole arrangement was barely kept from collapsing into chaos and pathos by his generous nature, noble personality, force of vision and a subtle sense of magic that circulated through the place like wind and rain through the gaps in the walls, blazing up on the nights he had neighbors over for dinner around a bonfire with fairy lights strung all around.
Referred by a friend of his, I was the validation of his vision - an artist come to stay. He treated me like a king. And I, in turn, did my best to paint him a picture that caught the spirit of his dream.
Las Vegas Chair
The tour of the strip Norma had insisted on didn't leave me much time for painting. Back at the house, I just grabbed my paints and started in on the first thing that caught my eye, a plastic deck chair by the pool, with some plants reflecting in the blue water – a scene that conveyed some intimacy and privacy of space yet no doubt played itself out with slight variation at every other house in every other subdivision for miles and miles.
I'd worried that Norma might be offended by the subject matter or disappointed with the lack of finish, but she was excited to have an original painting depicting her place: "That's my chair – that's where I live! And now it's a painting." As for the rushed technique, she seemed to like seeing how a familiar scene could emerge from a fairly unresolved patchwork of colors – the abstract play of paint.
My efforts to get the chair painting done had already held up Norma's dinner party, but I wasn't quite ready to settle down. Pretending I needed to clean up, I sneaked out the garage door and ran down the block to make a quick sketch of the city at sunset...
Salida Sunrise
I desperately wanted to sleep in on my first morning in Salida but sensed the light at sunrise would be worth getting up for.
I woke myself up around 6 a.m., peered out the window by my bed, rolled over to grab my paint box, and did a tiny, quick painting of mountains and little houses in the early sunshine. I did it on reflex, without getting out of bed. It took 20 or 30 minutes and then I fell back to sleep.
Bass Harbor Marsh
My New England art tours had been plagued by rain. And on my only other trip to the fabled Mount Desert Island, when I was a child, it had poured the whole time. I was desperately attached to the idea of being there in good weather, seeing the sunshine sparkle on the ocean and rocks and fall foliage.
I'd been selfishly delighted to hear from my host in Southwest Harbor that the island had been suffering an unusual late summer drought. "And it never rains in September, so you should be all set."
But I wasn't. When I arrived in view of Mount Desert Island – after a long and, of course, sunny drive – I was met by the sight of a thick line of gray, a massive fog bank, advancing from the eastern horizon. I didn't know the geography well, but it looked to me that Southwest Harbor had already been swallowed up into the darkness. I drove forward into fog, and rain. And it would rain harder than I'd imagined possible for two solid days.
I knew it would be a soggy visit if I simply settled in to a state of discouragement and frustration – if I didn't, in fact, paint something before I arrived. A mile from my hosts' house I located a scene that had some potential for me, even in the fog – in retrospect I'd have to say: especially in the fog...
Afternoon Kitchen
My host's husband, John, a gruff man at best most days, was not as happy to have me around as she was. I was one in an endless series of too many visitors. On the first morning at their house, I did a painting of his flower garden, to get on his good side.
Their breakfast nook struck me as an ideal subject for an Itinerant Artist Project painting. But to get it done I had to stand right in the front doorway, with the screen door propped open, listening to John scowl as he went in and out, to run errands, to carry in groceries. Ironically, the interaction yielded a painting that conveys cozy warmth and hospitality, one of my project's most popular images.
Incidentally, when given the choice of an original painting or a framed print from my catalogue (in payment for a speeding ticket), the Missoula traffic judge let his clerk decide. She chose a print of this image "because the colors go well" with the courthouse decor.
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