Just Now -- have you noticed? -- a number of visual artists of a certain age have begun to produce work wherein the force of their ambition - which has nothing to do with aesthetics - constitutes the work under review.  Standing before a blank canvas and the perennially blank slate of his or her career, where personal glory and satisfaction are besides the point and peer acknowledgment is, such an artist begins to make what I see hanging in many contemporary galleries: a coffin.  Not the shape of one -- a coffin-shaped anything is captivating -- but something that does not feel well against the skin, like the terrible satin lining and cardboard wood used to construct a coffin -- cheapness unto death.

Few artists have the ability to make you feel as though you aren't wasting more of your time staring and staring at a visual conglomeration -- a painting, a sculpture -- that's ultimately about the artist's greed and need for money and power in the larger world.  James Nares has the peculiar ability to make me forget greed as a motivating force since he is a deeply spiritual artist.  That is, he is interested in painting as a form of meditation, objects of reflection made up of light and color and grace.  In looking at the majestic line of his work, which resembles, sometimes, the long life lines fortune tellers speak about, one can forget death.

I want to say that I admire the liveliness of James Nares' work, but that sounds odd to me -- too toe-tappingly country and western -- so I shall say that I admire the aliveness and shapeliness of this work, which produces lovely resonance.  I enjoy being around the swish and hum of these new James Nares paintings, which resemble the sound of life, moving, humming.  Some of the paintings are thick with despair, moody in the way of tree branches seen through fog.  They inspire too many images in writers too fond of imagistic writing, but there you are.  They look like the first lines of a short story, when the writing is smooth and rhythmic.  I don't want to disturb those lines by adding verbal strokes of my own.  It feels inappropriate to write about a James Nares painting.  While they are purely visual works, there is something literary about them -- they tell a story.  Of the sea, perhaps, and a single wave rising out of the dark sea water, or a lone woman's cigarette, smoke curling about her red lips or purple hair as she sits at a bar, waiting.  For what?  For waves of loneliness to stop washing over her as she waits to laugh, or right before she decides to order another drink.

I'm ill-prepared to discuss Nares' recent work as a critic since they cannot be referred to anything else -- the critic or art historian's chief function.  They are iconographic paintings.  They test and withstand the viewers feeble attempts at interpretation.  They are windows into life staving off death, if only for a while.