James Sterling Pitt

James Sterling Pitt's newest body of work, a series of smallish, abstract wood sculptures, is in all the obvious ways, a complete departure from the representational work of his last show and most recent output. Physically, the work has the appearance of three-dimensional, two level drawings, the wood forming thickish lines that create an outline and also run through the work (imagine, perhaps, if the Fauves made minimal abstract drawings). The linework is highly edited, and is repeated back-to-back, as if two of these works were stacked atop each other with a slight space between them. There are also several pieces that feature wire "beaded" with small objects, loosely woven through the outlining. The works have a depth emphasized by multiple and repeating cast shadows.

 

Immediately, a link can be made to the work of Richard Tuttle, an artist Pitt counts as one of his greatest influences, along with AgnesnMartin. Specifically, these recall Tuttle's wire wall works. Also brought to mind are the Japanese character-inspired wall ceramics of Robert Brady. And while these are certainly abstractions, as with Brady, there's a sense that they're not completely so. Some of the shapes do have a font-like quality or appear to be details or simplified outlines of images. Which, in large part, they are.

 

These works are, in fact, sculptural representations of drawings that Pitt makes one after another, line after line, on 30-by-22-inch paper. "These are calendars," says Pitt of the series of drawings. "It's a chronological way of me keeping track of forms and events in my life, because of my short-term memory problems." Pitt has been keeping these "calendars" or visual journals for five years, and it was also from these that the earlier work was derived. Pitt began making these calendars after surviving a major car accident that altered his thought processing, and led him to rely heavily on his intuition. Albeit, this is not an entirely new way of going about things for the artist. It was by following an unexplainable tug that Pitt even became an artist in the first place.

 

When asked about his start in art, Pitt tells of his first visit to New Mexico the summer after his freshman year of college. "I immediately started painting," he says. "It was the weirdest thing; I'd been doing poetry and writing music before that." Instead of returning to university in Pennsylvania, he stayed in New Mexico and earned his BFA at UNM; upon graduation, he went immediately toMills College, in Oakland, for his MFA. Today, he's still based in San Francisco. 

 

When Pitt was at a crossroads five years ago, while recovering from the car accident and unsure of what, or if, his artistic practice was going to be, again it was a slightly otherworldly occurrence that led him in the direction he's been following ever since. Pitt was offered a two-week residency at Djerassi as a way to just get him back to the studio. A few  days before the residency was to start, Pitt had a dream

involving one of his UNM professors engaged in a critique of the work Pitt had been doing just before the accident. “The professor was furious and said, ‘This is not your work!’” Pitt recalls. “Then he showed me three rough-hewn sculptures made of wood and cardboard and said, ‘This is yourwork, and if you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it.’”

 

Pitt made those sculptures, and shortly thereafter, “I woke up in the middle of the night and just started drawing these drawings,” he explains. “When I woke up, I had a full sheet. I had a blueprint to carry on.” And Pitt has been working from these visual journals ever since. As life continues to unfold and Pitt becomes more confident in his intuitive process and pushes himself to work through unknown territory, his art continues to grow and change. “I’m excited about the direction things are going in,” Pitt says, simply. “It feels right.”

—CHÉRIE LOUISE TURNER