James Koskinas was raised in Scottsdale, Arizona. As a boy he ran free and wild in the desert, collecting lost animals and develolping his lifelong passion for wide open spaces. He moved to California and later attended Oakland Arts and Crafts to study painting. He served in the the U.S. Navy. Later he traveled on his own over a three year period to Asia, Europe, the Middle East and in to India. Koskinas has lived and worked in St. Thomas, Us Virgin Islands and Peaks Island, Maine where he pursued his love on restoring old houses. Later travels took him to Africa. Along the way Koskinas attended U.C Irvine where he studied creative writing, he also pursued his love for the theater where he studied The Method under Philip Bennett at the Stanislavski Theater of the West in San Francisco. Work and travels took him into the refugee camps in Bangkok. Koskinas paints his very expressionistic painting in Lamy, New Mexico. He shows in Santa Fe on Canyon Road at Selby Fleetwood Gallery; at 1228 Parkway Art Space; and at New Editions Gallery in Lexington, Kentucky.
You can understand an artist by how he uses the paint. You can tell what he’s been through, what his conclusions about life are, how he is inside himself. Koskinas’ paint is very strong both emotionally and intellectually. There is a very direct link between his heart, his brain and the canvas.
“The paintings have total integrity of background/foreground relationships. They push forward on a frontal surface attack, building mass and volume while locking into the two dimensions of the canvas. They fill the space with an event of great integrity. Koskinas rips the surface and the world with an uncompromising intensity and severity. Yet there is also an extreme delicacy and sensitivity to the work.” (Edward Gilliam, artist)
Koskinas on Koskinas
The Equine Series
My horses are minimalistic. The paintings are done with a sense of immediacy, building thin coats of paint in many layers. I live in the desert, negative space, i.e., the sky, fills the horizon. There is an absence of objects. I have reduced the horse to its essential self, stripping away the suggestions of its powerful myth. What colors I’ve used become a sign of the transcendental self, or a primal act of creation.
For me, the horse is emblematic of man’s desire for strength and freedom. It is the essence of this energy that is expressionistically captured in each of the paintings. Akin to cave paintings in the Totemic images, the horses have an undeniably powerful and evocative essence. The horse is a vehicle for me. It is a surrogate way of dealing with myself, a form to house my energies.
The Figurative Series
The figures are existentially the struggle between man’s light and dark sides. In the reconstruction process of the work, new images appear as a result of an act of physical, psychic aggression. I build mass, volume and texture, using construction tools, stripping paint down and rebuilding it, repeating the process, rendering the work entirely modern–stripped of everything extraneous and in its most raw and powerful form.
I use the image of classical man and primitive man to focus our sense of premonition and discomfort, and the balancing of beauty and fulfillment. The artwork becomes the fragments of an exploded self, almost out of control, representing the torn psyche of the self, beauty love and the dark side–the tightrope between the constructive, completed being versus the ambient energy of self-destruction.
Herein lies the key to my work: balancing the enormous psychic energies and taming them into becoming.
Horse 28
