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Sometimes people think Jeffery isn’t paying
attention, and sometimes he isn’t, but it’s kind of an endearing charm, his
frequently having to ask his friends to repeat things. Sometimes people think he’s
angry, but usually it’s just because he’s kind of quiet.
Jeffrey has been interested in art since
childhood, declaring himself, even then, an artist. He
doesn’t like cold weather except that he can wear his scarf and pij coat and jokes
(is he joking?) about spending winters in the Southern Hemisphere. A dislike of the cold, dark, northern winters and
disinclination towards living in California, were principle factors, he says, in his
decision to remain, for school and subsequent living, in Austin, so he’s always lived
in Austin. |
Flower Pattern Q and
A
An Artist's Statement with
Jeffrey Primeaux, Artist
Your most recent
paintings have a slightly different look: is this Flower-Pattern phase II?
I suppose you could say that. Previous to, “Creaky Veranda Garden,” I wanted the
paintings to have a flat quality; but starting with that one, my interest shifts to making
paintings with more sense of space.
You see them as less
abstract then?
Yes.
Still you’re using
the same sorts of source images, that is, patterns from wall papers, textiles, and such.
Principally; however, my choices have been inclined towards those which lend themselves to
making scenes. Also, I’ve been taking some images from antique botanical and animal
prints.
The very same sorts of
prints that inspired your Reactionary Decorative?
Yes. As you’ll recall, it’s not the prints themselves that bothers me so much as
the way they are used as something of, what? respectable? lazy decoration, so perhaps it
isn’t so subversive as it may seem. At any rate, most of these prints are less
pictorial than they are illustrative in a sort of scientific manner. I’m integrating
them into the paintings in much the same way, with the same ideas in mind as the
patterns.
Are you still asking,
“which part of a painting is the painting,” then?
Did I ask that? That sounds like me being clever. No, not in the same way, at any rate:
where before the interaction between parts, most importantly, was the manner of how one
part was painted comparative to another part in as much as it made one part seem the main
part and the other just whatever, I’m more interested, at present, in constructing
the whole surface of the painting as an image using those disparate parts. |
