James Borger
James is a Kansas artist who integrates still life with the expansive Midwestern landscapes and skies to create unique paintings. He uses the term “Stillscapes” as a description for these works.
For the last 20 plus years James Borger has been primarily exploring the still life genre. As a nod to the Renaissance “en plein air” still life paintings, his early still life work focused on outdoor still life scenes with regional landscapes. Borger coined this body of work “Stillscapes.”
“My intent was to part from the traditional dark toned interior still life scenes, releasing the still life objects into the bright open air and open landscapes of Kansas.” Continuing the still life exploration, recent paintings have moved back indoors and, for the most part, have kept the open brightness of the outdoor works. Background landscapes have been replaced with interior geometric abstracts (in some cases the background abstracts are an extreme simplification of the foreground objects).
In the beginning the abstracts were contained within frames as a painting within a painting. As a continued progression the abstracts have been removed from their frames and encompass the full background. This has moved the work into an arena of space contradiction. The deep space of the still life objects is juxtaposed against the at modern space of the geometric backgrounds.
The flat space seems to accentuate the dimensional quality of the foreground objects. An effort has been made to keep the still life objects simple in form to further promote the deep space e effect. In some cases, the still life objects take on a humorous anthropomorphic role. The backgrounds use layering and gradations to subtly imply dimension and depth to fortify the unity of the paintings. Complementary colors are paired together to create a vibrant energy.
A good deal of works in this show features the more recent fully abstracted backgrounds but James has included a few paintings that show the progression/transition of the still life works. James Borger is represented by regional galleries (including Reuben Saunders), as well as galleries on the East Coast. His work is in private and corporate collections across the country.
