Today we’d like to introduce you to Jay McMillen.
Jay, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I am retired and an “emerging artist.” Fifty years ago, I watched, awestruck, as photographs emerged through murky developer in the tray under my fingers: my images, photographs I had taken, offering memories to which only I could open the door. Now I watch colors mix and swirl as my fingers extend through palette knives and brushes, scraping and gliding through bright color pools on a canvas: my colors, on canvas I stapled onto stretchers I built, challenging experiences to which only I can open the door.
I started painting about five years ago and have had exhibits in Oklahoma City, Norman, Broken Arrow, and Tulsa, OK. Texas exhibits include Brownwood, Waco, and Lubbock. My studio is in my home, in Woodway, a suburb of Waco, TX. The next exhibit opens June 5, at Kieran-Sistrunk Gallery, 2120 Washington Ave, Waco. The exhibit hangs until the closing reception on June 26. The exhibit theme is “A Celebration of Life and Love,” including paintings expressing the emotions experienced over the past six months as my wife was treated for esophageal cancer.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Each person, I suppose, hopes to leave lessons so that others are spared mistakes. Each person seeks the highest possible trajectory of life such that the shadow of existence is cast over as many others as possible. Practitioners of the humanities spring from the edges of human experience. Artists, musicians, poets, and writers create experiences from the air that fills their lungs, the water that slakes their thirst, and the mud caked on their shoes.
My experiences come, not from the edge, but from the center of human existence in North America, unremarkable in every way. I chronicled my loneliness and discontent using a typewriter, a clarinet, and a camera, in words, notes, and photographs, all seeking to escape the dusty isolation at the edge of the American Desert. I have never fully escaped the immutable truth that a sailor (me) born on the Texas Plains faces a life of quiet desperation.
No artist experiences a smooth road. Supplies are expensive. Exhibiting is a full-time job of its own. Generating fresh new ideas is a constant struggle. Sales are few and far between. For an abstract artist in Waco, those struggles are compounded.
We’d love to hear more about your art.
Life does not exist as a 2-dimensional flat surface; artistic representation of life should be much more complex than photographic images attached to a wall. I force this concept upon the unsuspecting, demanding that viewers experience art as they live—in multi-layer, multi-dimensional space, interacting with chaos and order.
My work comprises complicated arrangements and colors that stretch boundaries: paintings that have multiple layers; canvas that has been slashed, folded, and rolled; complex images that ask viewers to see beyond the surface. While I am not religious, spiritual elements seem to impose themselves into my work. My goal is to produce untamed work that arouses wild exuberance, child-like curiosity, and unrestricted fascination.
My work is unique. What artist would spend days (or weeks) on the creation and cut holes in it? Working with shaped canvas demands that I construct my own canvases. My work may be BOLD, PASSIONATE, or STRIKING. It may be over-executed, immature, or ill-informed. It is different, particularly in its use of shaped, rended canvas. And – – – you haven’t seen anything like this before unless you have seen other exhibits of my work. Love it; hate it; just do not be indifferent.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Success is eliciting in others the same feelings I get as I sit and gaze at Jackson Pollock’s “Lavender Mist” in the National Gallery. Success is creating an object so interesting or inspiring that another person is moved to tears each time the painting comes into view. I am an abstract expressionist artist. I’m not Grandpa Moses. My paintings are aggressive, in-your-face works, demanding input from the viewer.
Art-for-art’s-sake artists like me find success in each creation, but that success is hollow without others to see and appreciate the work. Creating and exhibiting art is rather like walking naked down the middle of a busy street. You are scared to death at the exercise, hoping you won’t be arrested, but at the same time, you want people to look.
Contact Info:
- Website: jaymcmillen.art
- Email: jay.mcmillen@icloud.com
Image Credit:
Jay McMillen
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