Biography
Jamie Bollenbach is a Seattle-based artist who creates complex, enveloping abstract oil paintings sourced in the figure and occupying vast, imaginary landscape spaces that bubble with humanistic vitality.
Bollenbach sees his approach towards painting as a parallel to the senses forming human consciousness: “Think of someone you were very close to ten years ago. What do you actually recall? It’s not still image…what you experience is a more like a lava lamp of different senses: sound, scent, color, glimpses and memories of intense but uncertain emotions – fluid, eternally transforming, winking in and out of being. Even when we are in the same room, the reality of how we are to others, and they to us, is terribly fragile.”
Born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska in 1964, Jamie Bollenbach began painting professionally in San Francisco and Oakland. He attended Reed College, and achieved an MFA in Studio Arts in Painting from the University of Washington in 2002, where he began intricate, highly spatial abstracts based on the human figure. He founded a studio-gallery in Portland, Oregon, has taught painting, drawing, and design at the University Of Washington School Of Art, the Northwest College of Art, Highline Community College and other colleges over the last ten years. He has lectured on his work and approaches to creative practice at North Seattle College, EMC Corporation, Univ. of Alaska, Evergreen State College, Microsoft Corporation, and the University of Washington, teaches intensives with the Frye Art Museum’s Studio Program and offers a full program of private drawing and painting classes in Seattle.
Bollenbach’s paintings have hung in galleries and private collections nationally, and he has exhibited throughout the West Coast including the solo show “The Amplitude of Time” at NOMA gallery in San Francisco, the 2015 show “We Will Never Not Have Been” at Stanford University Art Spaces, the Seattle Art Museum Gallery, and SF MOMA’s artist gallery. He paints at his studio in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle.
Artist Statement
Artist’s Statement
We Will Never Not Have Been: 18 Paintings and New Works from “The Amplitude of Time,” 2003-2015
Stanford Art Spaces, Paul Allen Center, Stanford University
We are far more than the surface details of our appearance. We are also humanity over time: the slap and turbulence of the radiating waves of a billion pebbles thrown into a still, deep lake.
Many of these paintings look abstract, but they begin as portraits worked from life in my studio in Seattle: direct observation of a person blended later with the uncertain memory and re-imagination of that experience. This artwork can only come into its nature because of the real time spent with that person. Often the model saw the work in the making and moved or even danced, which also built some of the abstract forms lines of the composition. The paintings were often worked long after the first sessions, trying to locate, in William Blake’s phrase, “eternity in an hour.”
The longer you look, the more you’ll see the structure: each brush stroke and element of color felt, flicked cleanly or struggled over for hours, weeks, even years. You are seeing the visual traces of a living, breathing person; my work to get to what it is that I think I remember. The subject is what was seen and felt in a fading moment in a studio, but incorporates what is real beyond the surface of resemblance, what requires abstraction as visual music, as tone and description and mood, to complete the painting’s record of a real person and experience. The paintings often have the names of the people who modelled, because they could never have existed in this form without their subjects.
As one of the models put it, “What you learn about her by watching is what turns the paint this color when you paint her cheek.” It is the old artist-toward-model gaze, with her gazing back, both then and now in my memory. The ancient tools – the mud of paint, the hand and eye, the play with the flat space that looks infinitely deep, reveal aspects of our being and our relationships that cannot be approached any other way. You are seeing the case for this in the oil paintings. The thesis is not on this page.
Using still images as a way to describe the complexities of time was famously used in Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which itself was sourced from Eadweard Muybridge’s early motion capture photography, whose early experiments happened less than a mile from this exhibit. Yet directly observed/imagined paintings- built over time, rather than taken mechanically all at once, have always folded the amplitude of time into their subjects.
Information cannot be destroyed, and to each other we are a kind of information, direct, sensory, not modeled, not analogous. We churn in and out of the living consciousness of other people, but strange and wonderfully, we cannot be quite erased. Even when forgotten, we will never not have been.
“I don’t paint just to engage contemporary art theory;
it’s dangerous to negotiate with theorists.” -JB
Biographical Note:
Jamie Bollenbach, an Alaskan and political creature until 1992, Jamie Bollenbach began painting in the early 1990s in the Bay Area and received his MFA in Painting from the University of Washington in 2002, where he maintains his studio practice, and has taught contemporary painting, drawing and life-drawing, and color and design with the UW School of Art, and numerous Puget Sound institutions. His work is collected nationally and he has shown all along the West Coast, including SF-MOMA and Seattle Art Museum’s artist galleries, as well as the solo show, The Amplitude of Time, at NOMA gallery in San Francisco.
Contact
Contact information:
Email: JamieBollenbach
Mailing Address: 1411 NW 54th St. #3, Seattle WA 98107
Studio Address: 4818 NW 14th Ave, Seattle WA 98107
telephone: 206.650.0591
Reviews
Dewitt Cheng Visual Arts Source 2011
JAMIE BOLLENBACH, “THE AMPLITUDE OF TIME,” NOMA GALLERY
Those solemn reports of the death of painting (or art) that seem to recur every generation or so, prematurely, get no respect from Jamie Bollenbach. In an increasingly electronic contemporary world, the Seattle artist champions handicraft, the tradition of painting, and the creative struggle with and against a chosen medium, loved (“I like the juicy.”) but refractory. Working with models, he isolates certain elements that seem to extend themselves into surrounding space , perhaps like cubist planes or futurist lines of force; gradually the process, memory, imagination, and a host of other associations (history, politics, etc.) enter the work, sometimes completely obliterating the nudes beneath, but leaving a human presence in his tumultuous, semi-abstract landscapes. Bollenbach: “My subject matter evolved from organic abstraction toward the exploration of transitory human presence, represented temporally in paintings as traces of light and color and gestural marks within a specific shape of space. I begin frequently from a live model. Elements of desolate, imagined landscape enter the work, pushing figuration to the edge of winking out—my version of the traditional symbol of the soap bubble as the fragility of life.” Also: “…Just standing in a a room is an amazingly complex system. And making art is a way to comprehend and express the mystery and wonder of a person just standing in a room probably better than other processes.” Artist talk Thursday, September 22, 6:00-8:00pm. Through October 15. Nomagallery.com.
References
University of Washington, Seattle
Professor Ann Gale, School of Art
Professor Phillip Goverdare, School of Art
Frye Art Museum
Negarra Kudumu, Manager of Public Programs
Pivot Art & Culture; Double Nasty Art
Amanda Dellinger, Seattle
Independent Arts Writer and Curator
Dewitt Cheng, San Francisco
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Alfonso Cosio, Corporate Art Specialist
jamie is k00lz!!!
- anon