James Lai’s sweeping panoramas depict the quiet endurance of a natural world that, in its own particular way, appears to playfully mirror the turbulent shifts of a culturally changing world. With his work recognised in numerous national painting awards and in collections in Australia and Europe, it’s worth paying attention to.
Lai’s figurative abstraction fuses colour, composition and texture into imaginative and dynamic interactions. Sweeping scenes of the Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands in NSW are rendered in a playful way; mountains are blue, trees are green and night skies shimmer with glistening stars against an oddly sun soaked ground. There is a gentle comedy in these works, and while they may at first glance appear obvious, they are constructed in a way that disrupts our natural perspective. “I see the landscape as a theatrical play… with its range of elemental characters and the dynamism of movement, drama and mood.”
Lai plays with our natural understanding of perspective and distance so that we at once feel intimate and peripheral to his constructed worlds. His colour palette animates the wild country he seeks to capture into lucid dream-like landscapes. “The weather can have a major effect on the aesthetic and mood of the landscape and I try to capture on canvas the dynamic atmospheric shifts that occur in nature,” he says. “To me, it mirrors changes in society and the many different attitudes to major issues in the world.”
In works like View from Narrow Neck Lookout or Night Skies, one instantly feels the physicality of Lai’s practice; sweeping brush strokes stop abruptly and layers of paint weave through one another. Yet underpinning each stroke is a story rich with personal and political potency. Lai skilfully recognises the ephemeral in the figurative and seeks in the Australian landscape a means of translating contemporary life.
Featured image: artist James Lai. Photo: John Lim. Courtesy: the artist.
