I went out to Jim’s in Coal Mine Hollow to retrieve a few more paintings for the show, and was struck dumb by the magnitude of a body of work that spans over 40 years.
Opening the doors to the barn, I saw the paintings lined-up on their platform as precisely and mysteriously as an ancient and undiscovered library. Each oak frame, all identical in size, might have been the binding of a volume full of mysteries and incantations; of tales told of cedar trees standing like sentinels across the land; of hayfields watched over by languishing goddesses, their fingertips resting on a world in which life is without end.
Thumbing through these volumes I stopped thinking altogether. I remembered again, as if it had been a long time, that there are emotions for which there are no words. We call these experiences, BREATHTAKING.
Perhaps this is why Jim has so carefully guarded his work from the public eye. Perhaps he didn’t want to hear all those useless words we summon to describe an essential mystery: the mystery of being wholly present in the eternal moment.
Maggie Maloney