2005 - 2008

2008 

* asterisk before title indicates work is no longer available

Flower-Pattern Phase 1: 2005-2006

Scroll down to view Phase 2 and statements for the series.

Flower-Pattern Phase 2: 2007-2008

Scroll down to view statements for the series.

Artist's Statement: F-P Phase 1

Flower-Pattern Q and A
An Artist’s Statement with Jeffrey Primeaux, Artist.

Are they portraits of wallpaper?

No.  Though a number of the designs do come from wallpaper designs, many come from other sources and these are combined to make the compositions.  Rather than portraits, they are like scenic tableaus, only with flowers, designs, and text, and stuff instead of people or nymphs in landscapes with things.

So, the foremost flowers are like main characters?

They are, in general, in the foreground, but I have trouble saying they are, “the main subjects,” of the paintings.  I hardly feel the works have any subjects.  Perhaps I should say instead that they are false subjects: they are there; they are situated in such a way as to make them appear the main part; but in fact the paintings are, to some degree, about making them appear that way by the manipulation of and at the expense of the various other parts.  Still I make a special effort to keep the paintings from seeming to have particular subjects (this may be a delusion or mere personal perception).

What about the background patterns?

What about them?  Oh, I mean, yes, there is a sort of spatial intention.  More important, though, is how that part, its images and the manner in which it is painted, will serve to foil or emphasize the flowers and such that will come later.  Also, the importance of these parts is something of an open question that I like to glibly sum up as, “what part of a painting is the painting?”

Why do some of the paintings have text while others don’t?

If I feel text will become too much like the subject of a painting, I instantly omit it.  In that same vein, the text may also serve as another false focus.  With rare exception, the text (also usually the title) is hinted at some time during the painting process rather than at the outset.  What (in the work or outside of it – like the song on a cd I just happening to be listening to at the certain moment) suggests the text varies from work to work.  Random word/image association is the closest thing to a strategy I can say I apply to this.

Artist's Statement: F-P Phase2

Flower-Pattern Q and A
An Artist’s Statement with Jeffrey Primeaux, Artist.

Your most recent paintings have a slightly different look: is this Flower-Pattern phase II?

I suppose you could say that.  Previous to, “Creaky Veranda Garden,” I wanted the paintings to have a flat quality; but starting with that one, my interest shifts to making paintings with more sense of space.

You see them as less abstract then?

Yes.

Still you’re using the same sorts of source images, that is, patterns from wall papers, textiles, and such.

Principally; however, my choices have been inclined towards those which lend themselves to making scenes.  Also, I’ve been taking some images from antique botanical and animal prints.

The very same sorts of prints that inspired your Reactionary Decorative?
Yes.  As you’ll recall, it’s not the prints themselves that bother me so much as the way they are used as something of, what? safe? lazy decoration, so perhaps it isn’t so subversive as it may seem.  At any rate, most of these prints are less pictorial than they are illustrative in a sort of scientific manner.  I’m integrating them into the paintings in much the same way, with the same ideas in mind as the patterns.

Are you still asking, “which part of a painting is the painting,” then?

Did I ask that?  That sounds like me being clever.  No, not in the same way, at any rate: where before the interaction between parts, most importantly, was the manner of how one part was painted comparative to another part in as much as it made one part seem the main part and the other just whatever, I’m more interested, at present, in constructing the whole surface of the painting as an image using those disparate parts.