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.

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American Folktale 39
American Folktale 39
Detail, American Folktale 39
Detail, American Folktale 39
American Folktale 38
American Folktale 38
American Folktale 37
American Folktale 37
American Folktale 36
American Folktale 36
American Folktale 35
American Folktale 35
American Folktale 34
American Folktale 34
American Folktale 33
American Folktale 33
American Folktale 32
American Folktale 32
American Folktale 31
American Folktale 31
Detail, American Folktale 31
Detail, American Folktale 31
American Folktale 30
American Folktale 30
American Folktale 27
American Folktale 27
American Folktale 25
American Folktale 25
Detail, American Folktale 25
Detail, American Folktale 25
American Folktale 24V
American Folktale 24
American Folktale 17
American Folktale 17