"Man lives always on the verge, always on the borderland of a something more. He is the only animal, apparently, who has built restlessness into a metaphysical principle. Even in the practical sphere he is restless in ways that mark him off, for good and for ill, from his fellow-animals. Human desires, winged by imagination, fly beyond the scope of natural instinct and mock at our efforts to satisfy them. Such is a favourite theme of moralists. But even when-perhaps especially when - we succeed in allaying the grosser forms of uneasiness, the sense of a beyond and the urge to wonder remains."
'Philosophy of the Threshold' by Philip Wheelwright
In Ben Jamie's Threshold, the artist continues to explore humanities triumph and challenge through an art historic lens and painterly constraint. Walking the line between gestural abstraction and figuration. These powerful paintings reference imagery from the romanticism period, 80's cartoons and ancient history.
Ben Jamie is interested in the Hero’s Journey, a popular narrative arc which he sees as a metaphor for the process of making a painting. This archetype sees a hero set out on an adventure before being challenged through crisis and ultimately transformed and returned back to the starting point to begin all over again.
Dark outlines transcribe and divide figures into camouflaged segments, merging subject and ground. When viewed up close these jagged forms suggest blocky abstraction - each segment rendered within the black lines of a thick application of oil painting mixed with beeswax, sand and damar varnish. The distinctive palette is made from only 4 colours; ivory black, titanium white, cadmium red and yellow ochre mixed to create all the tones seen on the raw flax support.
When viewed with perspective the previously abstracted forms draw together to reveal our protagonist, often caught in a moment of flux or stasis. These paintings are reworked and reimagined over time, disclosing the journey of not only the artist, but of the painting process itself.
