International Art Treasures Web Magazine

March 2006  

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James Lahey is an artist that favors series work. His earlier bone paintings led to clouds; rood screen; landscapes and abstractions; garden flowers and orchids and finally index. His work recently had a retrospective at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario that concluded in January of 2006.

Ihor Holubizky explores the Bone paintings. Lahey was allowed access to the University of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine collection of human bones in their Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology. From his observation he crafted a series of preparatory sketches and later paintings of this work. The imagery is pristine and owe more to the question of science than the theory of the macabre.

The scientific theme continues with his cloud series that are profound in their use of color and intensity. The power of nature through the atmosphere is inherent in these works. Through his Rood screens the artist took the cloud paintings a step further adding one color to the previously celebrated works to create a diptych or triptych. The inherent theme possesses religion overtones nodding its thanks to the Roman Catholic churches division between the profane and scared with the use of a wood or stone screen to differentiate between the nave and the chancel.

Nature abounds in works with his Ocean series, majestic nuances of the mighty sea shine through the artist's pallet. Each series appears to abound with a new visual reference to color and that leads to the latest of the artist's oeuvre his indexes.

Though the works all seem to flow naturally in order that is an unfair categorization to slot the talent of Lahey. All of the works in Index are from the same productive period and only he can say in which order they were produced. In the chapter, Earth and World in James Lahey's Index Abstractions Mark Kingswell notes that the paint is drawn from scrapings from other canvases and reworked in a new dichotomy of the earth. The abstractions recycled from other canvases add an intriguing aesthetic and political statement through the magnificent canvases.