February 14, 2020

James Busby, a drawing instructor at the School of Visual Art and Design since 2004, is included in a group exhibition at Mucciaccia Contemporary in Rome. 

James Busby’s paintings are an intersection of finely worked gesso, graphite, oil and acrylic paints on panel. In his labor-intensive process of building up layers of gesso and graphite and removing them through sanding and polishing, Busby follows no direct path. He allows intuition to alter the shape of the painting, the surface, and then the application of paint. His pieces often take three- dimensional sculptural form through angles and the exclusion of corners.

 

Busby’s painted surfaces are an abstracted labyrinth of grid and line. They are reminiscent of modernist and minimalist form, however they follow no doctrine. Busby’s paintings wonderfully have no single ingress or egress. Instead, the painting has multiple entry points that lead in and around the painting, out and back in again in an apparent ordered chaos.

The polished graphite surface reflects and blurs objects and light around the room adding another layer of depth, changing with the position of the viewer. This surface tension is key, whether accidental or intentional, it slows down the viewer long enough to consider the multifaceted surface and all possible directions in which the artist’s marks can take them. 

James Busby is represented by Mucciaccia Contemporary in Rome, L V H Art in London, Neumann Wolfson in New York, and Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA.