Painting in a way can get no purer than this.  The gesture of the hand -- a single, uninterrupted sweeping movement with a brush -- is transmitted to a canvas laid flat on a table.  It is a spiritual way of painting in that every constraint upon the sweep of the artist's hand that can be eliminated, has been eliminated.  We are left with, first, the materiality of the brush itself -- and James makes his own brushes, exquisite functional objects in all sizes and textures which live in a drawer in his studio and deserve to be exhibited in their own right -- and second, the ineffable influence of the artist's daily experience, mood and climate and all other nuances that give the day its grain or temper, no two days are ever identical, just as no two brushstrokes James makes are ever the same.  Each painting is thus the almost unmediated outcome of the myriad subtle forces acting upon his spirit at the moment of its making.

Of all such paintings he creates, it is then a matter of his taste as to which survives and which are washed away.  The creative act is stripped down to a spareness of gesture and selection.  What content emerges is a matter of subjective projection on the viewer's part -- I see a river, or a ribbon, or a sound-wave, or a thought -- and to an extent on James' part, in that the paintings do strike off assosciation in him, which in turn suggest titles.  They are beautiful paintings.  The backgrounds have a lovely mottling to them, and the brushstrokes themselves can be extravagantly sensual.  When hung in panels, as in the last series, they create dynamic connections, one with another that seem to multiply their energies and arouse still more complex surges of meaning.

There are other pleasures to be had from these paintings, strange cerebral pleasures to do with the metaphysical double-nature they seem to posess: they are brushstrokes, and at the same time they represent brushstrokes.  The mind at all times has trouble getting around these sort of conceptual loopbacks, we scent the possibility of infinite regression here, a vacuum world of endless reflections, which in the end arouse the faint but unmistakable whiff of madness.  But these are not mad paintings, they are full of grace and movement, tranquility and simplicity, and above all, clarity.  They are clear windows of the spirit.