Jim Gislason | Fine Art
Silkscreen was built to multiply an image. Here, the process is turned against itself — to produce a single, unrepeatable object.
The Work
Silkscreen exists to reproduce — to carry an image across any number of surfaces, endlessly. This practice redirects that machinery toward the opposite end. Oil paint is forced directly through the mesh itself, and the screen becomes the painting: no second surface, no print, no copy. What results is a relief — sometimes subtle, sometimes considerable — built from the inside out, bonded permanently to the decisions made in its creation.
Some pieces hold their colour close to the mesh, tinted and atmospheric. Others build outward in full relief, catching light from within the paint itself.
Presentation:
These paintings aren't stretched — they're pinned. The pins are visible on purpose: not concealment, but part of what the work is saying. A painting hung this way refuses the illusion of depth a stretched canvas offers, and asks to be seen instead as surface, skin, object.
About Jim
Jim Gislason works in a technique with no tradition to draw on — developed alone, over decades, discovery by discovery. The paintings are relics in the strictest sense: objects whose meaning can't be separated from how they were made.