Traveling between doors

Jai Hart on painting "sedimentary rockscape," in "Reshaping Absraction," now at Concord Art.

Jai Hart, “sedimentary rockscape,” 2023. Acrylic on canvas, fur, stuffin. 90x72x14 inches. Photo courtesy Jai Hart.

Jai Hart calls her paintings “relaxed.” What a perfect word – it seems so counterintuitive to the strife of producing something, and to the self-importance of Painting.

The soft, stuffed borders that bound her paintings give them a structure that pushes against the tried-and-true tropes of painting. Her unstretched canvas cradled by its gentle borders, cozy and basking on the wall, sometimes draping luxuriantly onto the floor. Aaaah.

If the form is pliant, the painting itself holds tensions. Colors buzz. Shapes jostle or overlap or break out. In “sedimentary rockscape” (above), white fur interrupts the humming patterns; the softer bottom seems to puddle beneath the harder edges and angles of the top. The piece is in “Reshaping Abstraction,” organized by Adria Arch at Concord Center for the Visual Arts through May 12. Jai shares how she made it.

I did not start with any specific idea in mind. I began with my usual process of stuffing sewn canvas tubes to be arranged as the structure of my painting. These soft, flexible tubes allow me to break the rectangular structures familiar to the Western art narrative.

After I attached raw canvas to my tube frame, I was eager to test some custom paint rollers I had created. By cutting brushes apart and reassembling them, I made thin lines with gaps between them, allowing me to put down parallel lines evenly spaced on the canvas. After my first paint application, I noticed how the irregularities of the lines created a static landscape feeling within the work, something I had not anticipated.

I then added colors that followed the linear application, focused on how colors emit various levels of vibrancy that take up space. This juxtaposition of colors brought more attention to the irregularities of these initial linear markings. I liked what was happening and wanted to stay with it to see where it would take me.