“The origin of this series was a large painting of a glacier that I was failing to complete with satisfaction. Frustrated, I cut it from the stretcher bars and turned to collage. As an artist, I have used collage to evoke a sense of playfulness, to pull myself from traditional painting, and to make color and shape into something new. As I continued to work through the collage process, I became intrigued by how the edges of each cut piece harmonized or created tension. The former glacier painting was now a black, white and gray collage in a grid. Inspired, I embarked on creating a series in this process- painting, disassembling, reconstructing and deviating from traditional painting.

In the Deviations series, you see the universal process of breaking things apart, then letting them breathe a new life. In each piece I explore how loose gestures and swaths of paint are then transformed to tight edges, unifying or colliding with other colors and marks. My goal in this series is to evoke something powerful in the viewer with the interplay of energy, color and texture.”

-James Antonson