In early 2001 I had an opportunity to install an exhibition featuring works on paper from the personal collection of Jim Henry.  The show had been organized prior to the opening of the gallery I had been appointed to direct; thus I first met Henry in the context of exploring what interested him in the various excellent graphics and drawings that he had collected. After the show was over, Henry and I began meeting occasionally to talk about all things art but it was more than two years before I actually viewed a substantial exhibit of his own work.  My 'once-removed' introduction to him through his preferences as a collector and his views on art foreshadowed my perception of the oblique nature of his work as an artist.

Henry's paintings are oil-based mixed media works on canvas, paper, board, and aluminum. His work is elusive at its heart - at once ephemeral and visceral.  In total, the work seems vaporous and in flux and suggests a spiritual quality embedded in the unattainable.  On closer viewing, the work's ethereal atmosphere is Henry's slanted entry into a tougher countenance, with an undeniable strength and integrity in the mark-making.

Each aspect of the work resonates with obliqueness.  Henry's palette at first appears as easily categorized: essentially post-modern and muted. Color sensations seem at first nonexistent,  then slowly the palette arrives at the viewer's senses and strengthens.  By layering subtle tones of varying opacity, Henry creates a complex matrix that juices up over time and reveals itself to the patient viewer.

Henry's work contains myriad organic forms including vines, ornamental leaves, circlets and wreaths, and sickle-like shapes suggestive of predatory beaks or claws.  These are often combined with or echoed by geometric elements such as stripes, bars, and circles. Sometimes this imagery is embedded in a painterly matrix and at other times, as in Wreath/Brand, the imagery floats in the foreground, evoking a kind of ritual emergence out of the void, perhaps, denoting a cyclical passage. In many of his pieces there is a solemnity, a feeling of something old, forgotten, excavated by time.  Henry's use of Sfumato coupled with his imagery suggests a supernatural quality akin to Morris Graves in his late work.

There is no obliqueness, however, in Henry's purposefulness as an artist.  He employs great intent and each quadrant of these paintings work when viewed closely or at a distance.  In some pieces, a dense solidity up close becomes a void or a smoky haze at a distance.  His work is seldom totally abstract, though it may seem so, as his subject matter is often fragmented or partially obscured by subsequent layers. The facile handling of mixed media coupled with the imagery evokes qualities of drawing, painting, and printmaking. His surfaces invite close inspection; they are sometimes painterly or dense, with gestural passages and other times subtly toned like polished marble or burnt stone.  Stained, specked, and smudged areas contribute to the feeling of wear and of chance that comes with great age. In ‘Of Pandora’, Jim Henry has combined these elements to produce a series of paintings that express well his unique personal vision and provide new revelations upon each viewing.

by Peggy Rivers