James Alfred Hart
James is a painter working manly with pigments from India, who makes paintings inspired from his journeys around the world and about sensations that he feel. He likes to absorb colour and is fascinated in the process of making his own paint, experimenting with various mediums and also the way that they are applied to the surface with different tools. Painting is his language to communicate his vision of the world around him, his intention is to keep finding new colours and new ways of seeing the world we live in .... "colour controls me".
James paints and absorbs colours inspired by his journeys to place such as Brazil and India, where colour is much more visible. By going head first into the unknown he finds himself in unusual circumstances that later trigger a sense of time within his paintings.
This is how he creates his visual documentation of the past whether it’s an isolated physical sensation, a moment of cerebral revelation or a powerful marriage of the two. These sensations, these emotive impulses, as opposed to intellectual ones, are the primary drive for the production of his work.
His paintings are collections of aesthetic symbols which have been chosen and refined to encapsulate the emotional essence of memories and their power to shape experiential reality. This latter phenomenon of reflexively interpreting the world can be seen in his work as his initial impressions of a place differ from his later representations of it based on his memories.
Despite being considered an artefact of the past, to James memory is always alive. Through constant and attentive engagement with what we remember, we are always shaping the present. This he feels is an intrinsically optimistic perspective as it presumes the existence of what is next, for what is yet to come if we have the desire to see it.