James Patrick Finnegan

Artcore Webzine
Read about artists who have exhibited with LA Artcore
James Patrick Finnegan
November 30, 2014
Uncategorized
Written by Robert Seitz
(Left) Behind the Fence, graphite, silk, colored pencil, bath mat
James Patrick Finnegan describes his work as a kind of riding the tension between real and not real.
It relies heavily on the juxtaposition of two and three dimensions. Using either to his advantage to
move the work off the wall, the oblique angles and trailing accents draw in their approach to create
suggested space. He is after a conversation between real and dream, which can be used to suggest
the process of art making itself.
Roadside Attraction, cardboard, colored pencil, fabric, foam, vinyl, wood
Some of the elements that recur are packages, boxes, wrapping and drawings of other containers. He
thinks some of their presence is related to his years teaching ceramics at the Univ. of Illinois. Porting
the one-off nature of the hand made to the one-purpose use of packaging, he appreciates the way
they are specific. In his work Tree with a (Voice Box) he uses a box that held a mole chaser, a kind of
simple metal windmill that sends vibrations into the earth and drives away moles. But at the same
time these added elements are also secondary, discarded even, and that mental process is similar to
the idea of making a mark on a drawing, and then adding something to it, taking the specific towards
the recognizeable by building relationships which, functionally, don’t exist until the artist makes the
decision to add them.
He is careful to distinguish his approach from any idea of abstraction or the surreal. Both have too
much of the intellectual or the mechanical in them, and he resolves this by freely mixing realistic and
graphic drawing into one. The real or most clearly representational parts give the piece somewhere
to rest. It’s this interaction that creates something pliable to work with, of creating problems and
then finding solutions. The artist marks his progress by actively looking for ways of making the
puzzles harder.
Tree with a (Voice Box), colored pencil, paper, cardboard
Another way he marks his progress is to follow his own internal feedback from the piece wherever it
takes him. He’s reached a point in his career where he looks at the work and it feels like it is
completely his own. As a result, it doesn’t look like any other work. He says this kind of priority has its
price perhaps – chasing originality may have pushed some people away, it’s not easy to look at
something unfamiliar – but repetition is boring and he has no interest in having that kind of
relationship to his art making. For the same reason he generally doesn’t use preparatory sketches,
preferring to watch the image for long periods of time before directing his hand towards an interim of
resolution as the moment requires, resulting in anything from fine details, to large swooping
curviform lines, to filling sections with pure color.
“Art is my religion, it gives my life purpose. I use whatever I want to move the piece forward. Like it is
for a songwriter, everything around you is material. There’s nothing that can’t be used.” The artist
tries to move on even when a work seems to be getting easy on the eye. Intentionally trying to forget
what’s good about it, he does this just to get to a different place.
Dave’s World / Red Penetration, colored pencil, cardboard, aluminum
Finnegan explained that the continual challenge to sidestep himself a little and direct his attention
towards interactive rigor with the drawings is not the same thing as obsession. He admits it’s hard to
dismiss an obsessive work, and to that effect he recalls an experiment, where he decided to do 40
drawings of an interesting upside down image. After about twenty he set it aside, and instead had a
firm grip on his own need to continually find difference, non-repetition, to energize his creative drive.
Part of this is stepping back, waiting for the static to become fresh again.
Following his own work’s tenuous and charged directions, that have to be watched like the reflection
of an inner landscape for movement, the artist pecks away wherever the image directs. It should
come as no surprise that he’s still quick to use the word fun to describe what he gets from making his
art.
Edge of Town, cardboard, colored pencil, fabric, foam, vinyl
Daiza, ribbon, canvas, paint, wood, doily
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