Jamie Newton

Selected Available Works


4 Square Mountain	Bories

Bridge	Chinook

Cipriano's Mulberry	Geology III

Hillock & Three Trees	Landscape

Map	Mulberry Kiln

Palmer	Ridge

Siskiyou Rain VII	Striped Ridge

Two Dotted Landscapes

Artist Statement

I have nothing to say and I'm saying it.

— JOHN CAGE

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

— JEAN COCTEAU

Frank Zappa is most often credited with saying, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

I find it difficult to say very much about what I do and yet, at the same time, I may blather on at length about influences and connections that seem to only tangentially relate. It’s like seeing in the dark, the periphery is where the information is.

Art to me is the books I read, the music I listen to. It’s the paintings I look at, the food I eat and the ridge I hike along. It’s my dog.

Art is the only twin that life has.

— CHARLES OLSON

Everything is interwoven in such a way that any one piece cannot be pulled out and made sense of. I think that’s true at just about every scale. Nothing operates in a vacuum. I think our Western mind has been trained to pull things apart but we keep coming back to the realization that things are integrated in surprising ways. The Tao of Physics. I expect the folks in the East probably think we’re a bit slow for finally getting around (or back) to this concept.

Qualities that are appreciated as ‘advanced’ in American Abstract Expressionism have been applied for centuries in Eastern art: gestural methods; … calligraphic imagery, free linearism, and aggressive or rapid brushwork; highly asymmetrical compositions…; atmospheric or flat fields of color; a spontaneous approach to art-making that includes the acceptance of accidental effects; and the notion of the act of painting as a self-revelatory event…

— JEFFREY WECHSLER in Asian Traditions

I remember what a thrill it was to first pick up a sumi brush. For me it was like opening your mouth and finding you can sing. All this thought, all this feeling, just flows out the end of your fingers. It’s a way of tying all of your various thoughts and influences together, a kind of funnel that brings all of that thought down…through the brush and onto the paper. You start feeling, when it’s working right, like you are dancing. It’s really wonderful.

When you start working everybody is in your studio –

The past, your friends, enemies, the art world,

And above all, your own ideas – all are there.

But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one,

And you are left completely alone.

Then if you’re lucky, even you leave.

— JOHN CAGE

When it works your hands are not your own.
You forget who you are.
There is nothing but the work in front of you.
It feels a tremendous act of ego to put your name on it.