James Kuiper: The Spaces Between

James Kuiper routinely gets up early in the morning to work in his studio or on his acre of property, itself a work of art. Perhaps influenced by a Calvinist upbringing in the small farm community of South Holland, Illinois, he seems to work ceaselessly. There are canvases outside on the day I visit, and, spread around his office, collages he’s been working on that combine antique drawings from 19th-century artists and images from human anatomy textbooks with overlays of his own drawings. They are eclectic and provocative and something he does as compositional studies.

Kuiper came to CSU, Chico in 1989 and has continued to paint as well as teach. Kuiper has exhibited widely (he said he stopped counting a long time ago) and has hundreds of paintings in private and public collections. He has most recently exhibited at the Friesen Galleries in Seattle and Sun Valley and at Galeria Alatxerri in San Sabastian, Spain.

Kuiper’s undergraduate education was in history, philosophy, and English, and the way he understands and explains his work is in literary and philosophical terms and references: “I’m very interested in the imagist poets and the way they juxtapose images without making much of a connection. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ is a good example of this. I construct visual images in much the same way. I’m interested in the way ideas occur. I remember being in church when I was a kid, and my mind would move from an idea I heard to something else and then something else entirely. I’m interested in that transition and the space between the ideas, how they are often illogically connected.”

The idea of the “space in between” is central to his art and to his approach teaching students. “I want there to be a dialogue between the image and the mind of the viewer. I value the experience that the viewer has with the work. I teach in the same way: I don’t teach my students to produce a ‘good’ drawing, but to experience observing and drawing.”

“ This movement from image to idea to image is characteristic of my favorite writers who are ‘magic realists.’ One of my favorite novelists is Gabriel Marquez, and another Abe Kobi, author of Woman in the Dunes, a novel about a botanist walking along the beach looking for spiders, who is drawn down a spider hole and enters another dimension. It isn’t clear where the real ends and the surreal begins. That space in between is interesting to me and is evidenced in my painting.”

So, listening to Kuiper describe his fascination with the space between real and imaginary, it is somewhat surprising when one looks at Kuiper’s paintings and recognizes landscapes—not representational landscapes, but definitely landscapes with horizons and layers of earth and sky, with trees and rocks and hills.

“ My paintings are essentially landscapes. That isn’t something I always recognized—I used to think I was a non-objective artist. I had this friend in Alaska, Kes Woodward, a ‘real’ landscape painter. He convinced me that what I was painting was landscapes. I looked at what I was working on and saw the plowed fields of my childhood and recognized the structures imposed on the landscapes by humans.”

Some of Kuiper’s pieces have specific mountain contours. He said, “The paintings incorporate declining planes, and looming mountains tend to a never-ending flux.” His images come from the many different places he’s lived: the agricultural landscape of the Midwest, the golden hills of California, the West African Savannah, and hot prickly Texas. He paints about the ways we are tied to the land, the way the seasons affect the land, and again, the way that we affect and change the landscape.

Kuiper’s career has been as serendipitous as his decision to become an artist in the first place—the result of a drawing class he took at the University of Michigan. Since that first art class and his subsequent decision to become an artist, he’s been a visiting artist in Alaska, in Texas, in Brazil, and in Spain, where he’s spent a decade of summers in the Basque town of San Sebastian, painting and getting to know Basque artists and chefs. He’s had numerous research grants and scholarships, including three summer scholars research grants, a CSU Research award, and numerous travel and materials awards from CSU, Chico.

Kuiper is currently collaborating with Troy Jollimore, Philosophy, and the author of the prize-winning book of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory. They are producing a limited edition of a book combining Jollimore’s poems and Kuiper’s paintings, to be published by Black Rock Press. He is also preparing to travel to Brazil and Ecuador in March, where he will have shows. He will share the show in Ecuador with colleague Sheri Simons.

James Kuiper: New Work