Biography

Jim Phalen was born in Arizona and showed an interest in art from an early age. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute and received a BFA with honors. He then earned his MA and MFA in painting from the University of New Mexico. After graduation he moved to New York City with his current wife, Ellen Garvens where he lived for 5 years. He has taught at Bowdoin College in Maine, at SUNY, Buffalo, at the Univ. of WA, the University of Puget Sound and Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. His work has been reviewed in the NY Times, the Seattle Times and he has been included in the quarterly New American Painting five times. He has exhibited nationally as well as in Europe. He is represented by the Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco, CA. The Frye Museum in Seattle held a one-person exhibition of his work entitled ‘Undercurrents of the Commonplace.’

Project Summary

With the rigors of naturalistic portrait painting as his subject and the Rondanini Pieta as his polestar, Jim Phalen is more interested in revealing the process of painting than creating a so called ‘finished work’. His inspiration comes out of drawings and unfinished or inadvertently transparent paintings (as seen in many Velasquez works). He admires the freshness of drawing where the working marks of process, trial and error, revisions and false starts are all readily apparent. Painting is, for the most part additive, ‘mistakes’ are covered creating a certain refinement. Phalen’s work is not just additive but subtractive as well. After the paint is applied and dried he will sand back (erase) through revealing what was. The demanding nature of portraiture insists on constant revision. This is what he will be pursuing at I Tatti, finding interesting and compelling faces to render them naturalistically in paint. Mistakes and all. He takes inspiration from the unfinished, hoping to capture an openness of interpretation, a visual shifting of perspective. He believes that the journey is more than the destination. Artists that have been an inspiration are Antonio Lopez (Spain) Richard Diebenkorn (United States) the unfinished work of Degas, the unintended transparencies of Velazquez and of course, Michelangelo’s great masterpiece the ‘unfinished’ Rondanini Pietà in Milan.