James Brinsfield
The son of a career military man, James Brinsfield spent much of his early life in Germany. While in high school in Frankfurt, as he was struggling in woodshop class, he saw an artwork a fellow student had created in studio art class. “That was it,” Brinsfield recalls. “After that I would go into galleries and become transfixed, looking at real art.”1 He decided to become an artist and was accepted in the young artists studio program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1976 Brinsfield earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He then taught art in economically challenged neighborhoods in Chicago and exhibited his work at the prestigious Nancy Lurie Gallery.
Perhaps because of his background, Brinsfield observes, “I always felt I was a bit of an outsider.” Although Chicago was famous for its “Hairy Who” Imagist art scene, he nevertheless moved toward abstraction. In the late 1960s, while still in his teens, Brinsfield was struck by a particular abstract painting by Gyorgy Kepes that referenced, chillingly, the bombing of a church in Alabama. “This showed me,” Brinsfield states, “that you can make abstraction and hook it to content.”
Brinsfield is now in the vanguard of postmodern artists making abstract paintings that subtly fold in personal as well as political content. Combining content with abstraction is an aesthetic high-wire act; Brinsfield accomplishes it in a variety of ways. His paintings, made with shiny enamel paint on paper attached to canvas, have sleek liquid surfaces that are beautiful and enormously seductive. Stylistically, the work oozes confidence and appears effortless, and the beauty of the paintings pulls the viewer up close. Careful examination, however, gradually reveals shapes and forms that resemble such things as tanks, caves, cars, highways, and planes. It is up to the viewer to decode such symbolic shapes; some may refer to the horror of contemporary war scenes, while others reflect the artist’s love of automobiles or music.
While Brinsfield’s work evokes the gestural and intuitive painting style of the Abstract Expressionists as well as the conceptual agenda of postmodernism, he is also a classicist. Before brush meets canvas, each of his paintings is thoroughly and painstakingly worked out on paper—these “sketches” are works of art in themselves— and the imagery he incorporates into his work is the product of considerable deliberation.
Brinsfield’s ability to combine contemporary sociopolitical signifiers with the most pressing formal issues of Western painting defines a career that fully embraces the dilemmas, challenges, and delights of our visual culture.
—Elisabeth Kirsch
