Title: “Highway 80 – The Day After”
Artist: Harry James
Size: 8” x 10”
Medium: abstract, acrylic and glass on canvas
Artist Statement: I showed up on the “Highway of Death” after one side was somewhat bulldozed open to allow for traffic.
The road was pitted, littered with small scraps of undefined metal, and on each side was a windrow of damaged vehicles – all thrown together in a mixture of colors, textures and random fuel, fluid, and odd smells.
The day was illuminated by a dull yellow sun smeared across a consumptive sky and beneath it all the road and its ill-fated travelers.
The paint was applied using a trowel. The glass was embedded in the thick paint providing a physicality to the piece that the paint itself could not truly convey. It is a confusion of things, colors, shapes and white space, which represents those things blocked out to the eye and memory, all splayed out for the viewer to try and process as snapshot of a place and time.