James Deeb
Evasnton, IL
Art is a spinning coin. For one bright moment, you can see both sides at the same time.
Message
I was born behind the wall in what was then West Berlin in 1964. I remember drawing a lot as a child and making animated movies with lumpy clay dinosaurs. I graduated from Indiana University at South Bend in 1988 and received an MFA from Western Michigan University in 1994. My work has always been darkly humorous and melancholy in roughly equal measure. I refer to it as art in a minor key.
Statement
This work is from a loose, on-going series of paintings and drawings called ‘Mythic City.’ Taken together, it is a personal and often fantastical record of the people I observe as I move through the city of Chicago. Since I work from memory, however, they are not traditional portraits, but composites of different features and expressions. It may be the lined, thin-lipped mouth of a man on a train or the heavy eyes of a woman in a coffee shop. These and other half-remembered fragments are merged together as part of my process. I strive to infuse each piece with pathos and a bit of mystery in order to create work that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.