I met James quite a while ago at a show we were both in at the Green Line Cafe. I thought his work was some of the strongest there, really great color and surface.
We are now goodreads friends and he wrote the following comment recently. "The cave paintings are not hunting pictures; the oldest art is not the crudest, with the artists getting "better" over time. The oldest art found so far -- 30,000 years old -- is probably the most illusionistic and skillfully done. I read an article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago by Judith Thurman about the cave discovered in France in 1994 (Chauvet) and she mentioned The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists."
Above, Light Study 9, 2008, 12 x 12 inches, oil on board by James Erikson.
