Jim St. Clair: Studio Visit

Jim St. Clair bought a 13-foot speedboat last year and has been making a lot of paintings from the boat. Most of the paintings hanging in his studio/living room have water in the foreground. There are views of the Statue of Liberty and of obscurer shores where rotting boats and tires lay in the wild grass. The locations in his paintings have a touch of the exotic about them since they're not views we commonly see. The mobility of the small boat gets him into formerly inaccessible sections of the planet. He's taken the boat up the Gowanus Canal, for instance, and like an urban Monet, painted the view of the back of a factory, at the edge of the canal. He's done paintings from the Hudson River of aspects of the city skyline and, further upriver, views of the forested shoreline. Returning to the same spot for three days near the base of the George Washington Bridge, he did a painting whose perspective wraps the awesome span around the picture surface. Because he's painting from the water, the sunlight is intense and we're reminded of the joy bright sunshine can make visible. His colors shout with the vibrancy of the sun at full power delineating everything and accenting the spaces the objects inhabit.
   "When I first started painting from the river," he says, "they were more documentary. These newer paintings are more about painting, looser. I've been weeding out how I want to think about pictures."
   For three months each year he lives on a friend's 10,000-acre ranch in Oklahoma. Since the land is so open and the vista so spread out, the paintings he brought back most recently are all two- and three-paneled. These paintings, with the space so immense, have a different feel than the New York paintings. There's a lot more room to move around in. The colors are earthier corresponding to the natural interaction of weather and the land.
   His paintings, whether filled with the quieter edges of the cramped city or breathing the fresh air of the open range of Oklahoma with its big blue sky, deliver a powerful sense of location. Each painting invites the viewer into its environment with a romantic sigh.
   In a switch, he's currently working on four panels and trying to paint from memory. "Usually, I like to be right there. These won't be as literal." One almost-finished panel of a narrow street with flat, adobe buildings, seems to be an image recalled from a dream. The perspective is in a personal geometry and the images, pastel-colored and elongated past description, are slightly hallucinatory.

(Say, June, 1986)