ARTIST STATEMENT

Some people love dirt bikes, pizza, or shoes. I LOVE dogs. Dogs are love-messengers, broken-heart healers, semper fidelis true friends. They are couriers of shameless, noisy wet black rubbered-lip kisses, delivered with obscenely large (or impossibly dainty), hot pink & purple tongues. Every whisker pod on every muzzle, every snort, every muddy paw print constitute morse code that translates to art for me.

What triggers my art making like a fleeing squirrel triggers the hunter in a dog? A prick of a rotating radar ear at the approach of the UPS truck; a nudge of a popsicle nose on my elbow; a warm attention-seeking chin on my thigh, or a no nonsense ménage-a-trois wedging right in between the homo sapiens beneath a fluffy duvet on a winter's night…

Sometimes it's the Beagle/Basset baying at his 16th passing cyclist that afternoon, the jaunty little beard of the neighbour's Kerry Blue, or the flirtatious besitos bestower “Senor Bandit” who can charm the knickers off the Queen. Other times it's the Dalmatian who only poops in the ivy outside the Catholic school, or the cranky diabetic curmudgeon Schnauzer who eats only steak tartare. I relish them all.

My earliest artistic influences came from Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Vermeer, Pissarro, Miro, Klee, Gauguin & Pollock.

I work in Sennelier oil sticks, R&F pigment sticks and Windsor & Newton oil bars on Ampersand gessobord. I apply the oil pigments directly onto the hard surface without the use of brushes or toxic solvents.

C.G. James
Port Townsend WA 2006