James A. Allen
Paintings and Drawings

American Folktales

The "American Folktales", a series that dates back to the 1970s, have always been constructed in what today would probably be called a "post-modernist" aesthetic, deliberately mixing incongruent time-space elements and different stylistic resolutions to suggest interaction of accumulated affective experience rather than simultaneous or even sequential external events. Mixed emotions, mixed styles, mixed media: they all play a part. Frequently the images are presented in double-panel form, to further enhance the complexity and ambiguity of the relationships that are suggested. My interest is in how potent, seminal experiences, received through cultural and gender filters, conflate to express an awareness of a world that is at once grand and absurd.