The Ann Arbor News - Review
Energy as a state of mind
Isakson's art aims at perpetual motion
By John Carlos Cantu
Jim Isakson's "Emotional Landscapes and Other Related Forms" at the Ann Arbor District Library feature a decidedly homegrown neo-impressionism that's as dramatic as it is otherworldly.
Isakson's eerie (as well as not so eerie) landscapes in the exhibit emerge from an expressive creativity whose grand penchant for psychedelic cosmology quite nearly overwhelms his paintings.
Spraying his working surface with enough dashes of acrylic paint to build up an intensely muscular imagery, Isakson makes a virtue out of relentlessly texturing his composition. As he says in his gallery statement, his work swirls and twirls without end.
"Energy is the main basis of my objective," Isakson says. "The imagery painted, whether representational, nonrepresentational, or abstract, I convey as organisms, manifested as positive and negative energy through varied streams of perpetual motion.
It's no easy task as his art is on one level a conceptual gestalt where the steady accretion of pigment relentlessly builds his artistic topography. As such, there's no single place for the viewer to fix his attention. Each painting is, rather, a keenly Disciplined structure whose pointillist firmament holds it together.
Three of the 14 Isakson paintings in this exhibit illustrate by example his strategy. These paintings, – "Leaving Wyoming," "Fossiland," and "Spaceface" – touch on differing Isakson motifs bearing the same aesthetic motive.
"Leaving Wyoming," is every bit a representational landscape. Building a lush earthen ground that's contrasted by a particularly vivid sunset, Isakson crafts a romantic view of this western state. But "Leaving Wyoming" is also a state of mind because the myriad of daubs crafting this tranquil countryside is set in contrast to a turbulent cloud play that indicates all is not what it seems.
By contrast "Fossiland" allows Isakson to flex his creative muscle whilwe maintaining a participation in the landscape genre. This golden-tinged masterwork is a pointillist frenzy disciplined by mounds of shifting sand receding toward a single antediluvian fossil lying under a sun baked sky. The painting, although supremely eurious, has more than enough representational imagery to make it seem plausible eons ago.
On the other hand, "Spaceface", like a number of paintings in this exhibit, is purely fantastic. In theis work, like its fellow celestial companion, "Cosmic Carousel", Isakson goes off the deep end artistically and conceptually. Depicting the cosmos as a whirling mass of concentric ovals, Isakson paints a haunting portrait that can read either as a human face or a galaxy of colliding star clusters. Either way, "Spaceface" is a flamboyant commentary on personal identity and our place in the scheme of things.
Isakson's art conveys a vibrant tension that threatens to burst beyond its terrestrial moorings. And his "emotional" landscapes should be taken literally because he intends to provoke a response. Ultimately, however, as becomes readily apparent with patient examination, it's really the "other forms" that have captured his metaphysical fancy.
The Ann Arbor News - Review
Isakson show at Ann Arbor District Library: It's a Trip
By John Carlos Cantu
Surrealism often tells us as much about the inner life of it's creator as it tells us about his or her creativity. So what are we to make of Jim Isakson's "Transcendental Matter" show at the Ann Arbor District Library's third floor Art Gallery?
Focusing on the worlds of cosmology, geography and geology, Isakson creates phantasmagorias, acrylic pointillist vistas that explore space and dimension. Each of the 12 paintings on display here is given an otherworldly sheen through his palette. And his relentless daubs of paint are compactly fused - or on occasion, sufficiently dispersed – in order to guide the viewer's eye through some fantastic voyages.
"Fossiland's" funereal undertone finds Isakson painstakingly crafting a sunbaked desert with a single primordial fossil lying exposed on the ground's surface.
"Plasma Garden" imaginatively depicts a hallucinatory spray of abstract flowers. And "Forest Apparitions" teases the viewer's eye among shadowy animals inhabiting a barren grove of trees nestled in a verdant forest.
"Spaceface" is Isakson's sole concession to portraiture in this show, but it's also a portrait that blends a swirling starry nebulae in the guise of a mocking face.
"Camp Spirits" features a mystical plume of smoke rising straight toward the stars from a campfire.
The exhibits emblematic painting, "Solar Hypnotic," is a meditative work of art in which an extraordinarily sunny orb shines brightly in a becalmed heavenly sky.
In each painting, Isakson upsets our expectations of space. His "Transcendental Matter" indeed transcends our expectations by calling into question our understanding of what we perhaps too complacently call reality.
