ART
James Little’s Limelight
“James Little, Unapologetic Abstractionist Painter, Catches the Limelight,” the New York Times pronounces in the wake of the seventy-year-old painter’s Whitney Biennial debut. “Mr. Little waited more than forty years to show his work in the Whitney Biennial. This year, he prepares for two gallery shows and a collaboration with Duke Ellington’s music… At his longtime studio on Hope Street in Williamsburg, the artist said that working outside the limelight allowed him to find his voice and personalize his art. ‘I knew the recognition was going to happen sooner or later,’ said Mr. Little, who has stayed true to his labor-intensive approach to abstraction emphasizing color, design and structure… ‘I come from a family of construction workers who used to mix mortar and lay bricks… That had an effect on me.’ … Mr. Little was preparing for his first show with the Kavi Gupta Galleryin Chicago, opening November 12, called Black Stars & White Paintings. It will include more of his two-tone black paintings, a theme he has explored in variation over the last decade. He spends three months on each piece, painstakingly building their intersecting vectors in up to twenty layers of hand-blended pigments that he mixes with hot beeswax to seal the color and give it a kind of sheen.”
