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Art Reviews
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EXCERPTS FROM SELECTED REVIEWS


There are some few landscape artists whose vision makes their work an extraordinarily vivid and memorable experience. Their work may not be technically flashy, with more solid craftsmanship than pyrotechnics, infinitely simple rather than ostentatious. The paintings of Jim Mott are artworks of such quiet integrity.

- Exhibition Review, John Carlos Cantu, Ann Arbor News, Ann Arbor, MI


I find that the power of his work comes from its ability to evoke loss and hope collectively - the one incapable of surviving without the other. There is a purposeful, thoughtful dialogue at work in all of Jim's pieces, elegies to time, distance, memory.

- Jeff Ureles, cultural critic


I love everything about this well-examined life of his: the testing and proving of the willingness of strangers to connect with strangers, the daring, the apparent freedom coupled with initiative, the talent, and the expansion of the artist's own world, as well as the worlds of the people who host him. The art contains no flash, no shock, no pretentiously inaccessible concept, but still requires the viewers to think, to meditate on the simple and refreshing philosophy of connection, beauty and honesty.

- Rebecca Rafferty, City Newspaper (see full review)


Mott [creates] landscapes that are beautiful without being prettified, that are full of brash abstract expressionism while still being recognizable. Managing to find harmony in the relationship between man-made elements and the natural environment... he imbues his scenes with an un-postcardlike vigor that persuades us to see them with renewed appreciation.

- Sebby Wilson Jacobson, Rochester, NY Democrat and Chronicle



A visually perceptive and sensitive artist, Mott displays considerable technical range. He also brings expressive depth and poetic promise to superficially uninteresting or commonplace subject matter...introducing the viewer to a new way of seeing. . .

These small-scale paintings are concentrated records of intense experiences in nature. They are disarmingly ordinary and powerfully simple. A flat lake under a gray sky, a field of weeds and wildflowers, or a stand of pines each receives the same patient attention. Anyone who thinks what Mott does is easy should try it. The artist captures the visual drama before him with small brushes. But this isn't fussy, linear painting. His loose strokes, dabs and zig-zags are like jazz riffs - sudden variations on a thematic core. Technically the studies are built on a bedrock of excellent drawing skills, but they are so loosely done that their vividness holds at even 20 feet.

- Exhibition Review, Judith Reynolds, City Newspaper, Rochester, NY


Mott's work reminds me of what Fairfield Porter's body of work might look like, if he had relied on gray more than he did—in other words, if he’d settled here in the upstate corridor of Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, where gray skies are the default backdrop for life. He has the same generalized execution, the same feel for the most mundane moment of the day, the unspectacular and overlooked scene. Mott works small, mostly on little rectangles of conservation board, and he sometimes finishes two paintings a day, and when he succeeds, the image has the kind of life that Hockney celebrated in the book Hand, Eye and Heart, back when he was on his campaign against the use of cameras as a tool for painters. Mott’s work is about creating form through the juxtaposition of values and suggestion, not detail and definition, and it’s as much about the evidence of gesture, the energy embodied in the act of putting paint on a surface ...as it is about the scene itself.

- Dave Dorsey, Represent


These is the best.

- Young visitor's notation in the guest book at the first IAP exhibit.














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