Jamie Nares at Durham Press | Through the Years

EARLY BRUSHSTROKES: THREE ACES | THAT A FACT

Both suspended and passing through time, the iconic solitary brushstroke captures the physicality of Nares’ entire body through the splatter and curve of the monumental mark created as she moves across the page in almost dance-like motions – precise yet instinctual, weightless but powerful, simultaneously free and with intent. Both the brushstroke paintings and silkscreened editions start with a similar process of using large, handmade brushes to create a single mark across the surface. In her paintings, the final result is the brushstroke painted with oil paint on paper, though at Durham Press this is only the first step in the process. Here Nares paints a brushstroke with thick oil and encaustic on acetate to shoot screens from in sequential exposures of the original image, building the image by printing screen upon screen in different transparencies of color to create a nuanced, rich sense of depth in each stroke. The printed brushstrokes do not try to imitate their painted counterparts, instead approach them from a new perspective by taking that single action and dissecting it – layer by layer, screen by screen, analyzing the organic, transient mark in an almost scientific way.

The suite of three prints, titled Three Aces released in 2002, marked Nares’ first experimentation with Durham Press in producing a brushstroke out of screenprint. Created by printing four layers each, Three Aces is the simplest brushstroke to date though it still manages to capture the intensity and depth of motion created as Nares twists, presses, and lifts her brush while sweeping it across the page.

The following year, Nares and Durham Press developed this process further in the edition That a Fact, released in 2003. Increasing the complexity of the print in comparison to Three Aces in terms of silkscreen layers and scale, this edition became characteristic of Nares’ work with Durham Press. Though an early print, That of Fact is built from a range of color and transparency which creates rich, dark areas where the brush has paused or splattered alongside airy, almost gauzy strokes that capture a hand quickly sweeping around a curve. The brushstrokes not only record human movement but also velocity as they seem to erupt from the start of the page, creating a freeze-frame of their dramatic trajectory.

Nares' practice has long involved reimagining the acts of painting and drawing, using custom, handmade tools and heavy machinery to generate singularly expressive works of abstraction. High Speed Cone Graphs 1 - 4, an ongoing project that began with Durham Press in 2018, is the latest of these explorations to find new modes of mark making.

Featuring dynamic curving lines, High Speed Cone Graphs possess a sense of immediacy despite their complex process of creation. In 2014, Nares began producing related works in her own studio, titled High Speed Drawings, by tightly wrapping sheets of paper onto a motorized drum. As the cylinder turned on its axis, Nares used handmade brushes to feed ink onto the page in various shapes and line weights. The resulting large-scale compositions, oriented either vertically or horizontally, evoke intense, unidirectional movement.

An extension of the drawings produced in her studio, Nares collaborated with Durham Press to fabricate conical drums with pitches from 0° to 90° for the series High Speed Cone Graphs. Meticulously crafted of wood, wire mesh, and plaster sanded to a smooth surface, the cones allow Nares to produce curving lines that are precise and concentric, while simultaneously soft and gestural. Much like in her earlier video work Pendulum from 1976, Nares uses a mechanical intervention to affect her own mark making. In Pendulum, Nares and gravity become partners in the video as the wrecking ball just grazes the ground of an empty city street. In High Speed Cone Graphs, she has instead partnered with these spinning cones, letting her mark be affected differently by the angle of each cone she paints on.

ROAD PAINT

As with all of her collaborations with Durham Press, the Road Paint Prints series explores new methods of mark making – in this work drawing directly from methods used in her concurrent Road Paint paintings that were the subject of a 2013 exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York. The monumental paintings in the exhibition, standing at 10 x 8 feet tall, were made using a road striping machine Nares brought to her studio. Typically used to create lines and dashes on pavement to direct traffic, Nares instead walked across the canvas with the machine to create large, gestural marks with thermoplastic paint, often adding glass beads that create a textural quality that becomes reflective from specific angles.

Utilizing the same machine on site at Durham Press, the Road Paint Prints began by walking the machine across pieces of melamine to create distinct, almost totem-like lines. The raised lines were used to make a polyurethane mold from a casting, on which ink was hand applied and printed using an intaglio technique over a black screenprinted background.

The Road Paint Prints feature a similar gestural quality and texture as her paintings, though on a much more intimate scale – instead of monumental, they appear almost ghostly, an apparition emerging from the void behind. Like her brushstrokes, each work focuses on a solitary line on a monochromatic background, emphasizing the subtle variations between the series despite their repetitive nature. As with her 2011 video Street which has been slowed down to a frame rate with the viscosity reminiscent of the thick paint coming from the road striping machines, Road Paint Prints reveals the nuance of movement, slowing it down with a mechanical intervention much like the High Speed series.

The notion of time, motion, and velocity continue to run as a common thread throughout Nares’ work, investigating it resolutely from all angles.

James Nares, born in 1953 in London, moved to New York in 1974 where she was active as a musician and filmmaker in the city’s downtown scene. In the 1980s painting became an increasingly important aspect of Nares’ practice, and she began crafting her own to achieve an extraordinary result: singular monumental brushstrokes with gestural energy and exacting detail. Over the last several decades, the artist has produced painting, films, and drawings, often utilizing self-developed tools and techniques to explore notions of movement and time.  

Nares has been collaborating with Durham Press since the early 2000s, producing screenprints with her signature, large-scale brushstrokes. Since 2016 her printmaking practice has expanded to also include intaglio, adapting road-painting machines and spinning-lathes to create striking images.   

Nares is represented by Paul Kasmin, New York. In 2019 a major retrospective of the artist’s work was mounted at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Nares has had numerous solo shows at Paul Kasmin and other galleries, and her films and visual arts have been featured in individual presentations at institutions including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2014); Sundance Film Festival (2014); Cleveland Institute of Art (2013); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013); St. Louis Art Museum (2012); and Anthology Film Archives (2008), among many others.

Nares’s work is included in many prominent collections, including those of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, New Hampshire; Long Museum, Shanghai; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

This artist is referred to as James Nares and with the pronouns she/her in all written materials at the request of Nares, who has been public with her gender identity since 2019.