Large Blue and Pink Still-Life - Acrylic Painting on Plywood by James Grant

James Grant's "Large Blue and Pink Still-Life" oil painting delves into the timeless genre of still life, a tradition that has evolved over centuries. While early still-life paintings aimed for faithful representations of the physical world, contemporary artists like Grant utilize this genre as a medium for interpreting reality in a distinct manner.

Grant's choice to portray a simple jug on a table might seem straightforward, yet it carries a profound poetic dimension. The selection of this large format is highly unusual in this type of artistic representation. The painting evokes a gentle, idyllic atmosphere that could remind viewers of a peaceful Sunday afternoon beneath a bright sky far from the hustle and bustle of the outside world. One can perceive the neon green grass, which illuminates the entire canvas. Grant carefully selects his colors, orchestrating their interactions with clear transitions. The end result is a representation with a conceptual core that transcends the confines of mere sensory data, suggesting a new reality. The artist masterfully handles structure, lines, and spatial composition in a flat plane as he dissects and reassembles space, filling the fragments with unusual hues. The painting then becomes an attempt to distill reality, laying the foundations of a language with abstract procedures, a representation freed from the constraints of figuration, foreshadowing many of Grant's future abstract works.

James Grant was a painter and sculptor most active from the late 1950s into the early 1970s. Best known for his sculptural work in plastics, this work by no means defined him but was rather a natural endpoint of an exploration into increased dimensionality -- starting from abstract canvases, moving through collages and bas-reliefs until the work finally came off the wall in sculptural form.
James Grant was born in Los Angeles in 1924. After receiving his undergraduate degree in Engineering from USC, he pursued his M.F.A. at the Jepson Art Institute in Los Angeles, studying under Rico Lebrun.
While working in Southern California, Grant had solo exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum, Pomona College, and U.C. Riverside, and group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum, the Oakland Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Art (now S.F. MoMA).
After Pomona, Grant enjoyed a two-year stay in Rome where his paintings began to develop in texture -- moving more towards collage work, using both paint and fabric. His stay was punctuated by a solo exhibition at the Galleria Pogliani in Rome.

Upon returning to the United States in 1962, Grant settled in San Francisco, where his collage work continued. In 1963 he had a solo exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. During the 60s, he showed regularly at galleries and museums both in the Bay Area and New York (Bertha Schaefer Gallery and Grand Central Moderns).
In 1970, he had a retrospective at Mills College in Oakland documenting his transition in style from abstract canvases to collages to bas-reliefs and finally the freestanding sculptures.
After a break from art during the late 1970s, he returned to painting in the early 1980s
and continued into the 1990s.
James Grant passed away in Stinson Beach, CA, in August 1997.

REFERENCE NUMBER: LU654313324322
PERIOD: Late 20th Century
CONDITION: Excellent
MEASUREMENTS: Height: 59" Width: 38.75" Depth: 1.8"
COUNT: 1
MATERIAL: Acrylic, Plywood
CREATOR: James Grant (Painter)