James Antonson's visual vocabulary primarily deals with water, sky, rocks and trees. His images can be seductive, capturing moments of pure tranquility, with a number of them harking back to the watery scenes of his childhood in Michigan and Minnesota. As a photographer he shoots the world around him almost daily, for reference, for ideas, capturing what he call "time's never ending melt."
This painting is from a suburbia series. They’re bushes with snow on a “front yard” next to the driveway of a house in Pittsburgh. The house is up there, but not in the picture. To me, these manicured shrubs are a wonderful example of how each person has their own way of bringing a little nature into their lives.
There’s a feeling of comfort and contempt in this image. Mainly because instead of thinking, most people are just rearranging their prejudices.
This is an oil painting inspired from an advertisement. I was inspired by the complexity of chrome reflections and the humor in the sounds of those horns.
Cheerios has a bee, Frosted Flakes and Exxon, a tiger. Hostess has a vulture and racoon, Mastercard, a zebra, Geico, a gecko, and you gotta love that Chucky Cheese rat. But it’s the stallion that seems to speak to young men specifically, seducing them to work hard and drive fast with a smoke dangling.
These pictures were taken in Greece, inspired by the artist Richard Prince.
With the help of Photoshop, I’ve been transforming some photos and doing paintings of them. This one is 24″x 36″.
These pictures are competitions, visual contests between man and nature. I’ve been seeking these “fights” lately. They’re everywhere.
I’ve been looking for abstract images to paint or draw and lately I’ve focused on explosions. As awful as they are, explosions are as common as haircuts. I’ve been trying to capture the physiology of an explosion and embrace it as a fact of this living.
