An American became and remains an international figure in his art in spite of never having spent a day in art school. Asked about the sources of his creative approach, he complained that he was always “reinventing the wheel,” that is, struggling to find techniques that he later learned were old-school, well-known, and available to the educated artist like so many tools laid out on a workbench. It had taken him the best part of his career to learn this lesson.

On the other hand, Janell James describes herself as “classically trained,” and goes on to demonstrate some remarkable qualities that resulted from that preparation. Her control over, and various ways of using, such basic skills as line, color choice and arrangement, layering and glazing, spatial presentation, and figuration are immediately evident. On the other hand, as she quickly adds, and which is clear to the observant viewer, she’s always been drawn to abstraction, characterized by a focus on geometric structure, surface patterning, simplification and repetition. Between her teachers and her own efforts, freed up by her solid understanding of the many ways painting can be done, she has developed what must be among the most complete set of skills to be seen on Utah’s gallery walls today.

Janell James, “Clan of the Cavewomen,” oil on linen, 24×30 in.

James trained on the portrait, a subject she still pursues, along with the inevitable taste for landscape, which no Utah artist can be indifferent to. Between those two special interests, what emerged in her body of work is an almost stunning connection to trees. As her title suggests, her scenes of individual trees set in the forest landscapes of Utah’s high country feel less like landscapes and more like individual portraits. A near-obsession with hiking in tree-clad places, rather than the desert topography that has made the red rock landscape internationally famous, has brought her again and again to discover these much neglected, living treasures, which her brush enables her to bring back and share with what has become an enthusiastic audience.

In all, James has painted 350 trees in oils—a number that if converted to time spent would far exceed the purported 10,000 hours required to master a skill. Thirty-five or so, depending on how they are counted, remain in her possession and are currently part of Portraits of Trees: Early Works 2009-2015, now on the walls of ONE Modern Art. Each of these gems boasts a minimum of ten alternating layers of oil color and glaze, through which James built up the optical presence that occurs when light penetrates the layers, reflecting from each in turn, and reaches the eye in a compound fashion that cannot be captured by a camera.

Lately, though, the artist came up with a way to make that hidden series of events—now referred to by expert technicians as what goes on “inside the painting”—more completely visible, but without losing the image and overall effect in the process. She uses several sheets of acrylic plastic that she paints on both sides with acrylic-based paint, then mounts together about as far apart as they are thick. In essence, she separates the color layers that would conventionally merge into one image, allowing the viewer to them both separately and together through parallax, which is to say movement of the eye between different points of view. Coincidentally, the bright, indeed light-filled image offers an exciting contrast with the comparatively somber aura typical of oil paint.

Recently, James exhibited a number of these new works, but the one showing with Portraits of Trees, “Punctuating the Blue,” also demonstrates the tendency toward an abstract style that must be part of its appeal to the artist. Surely, taking either a tree, or an image of a tree, apart is the essence of abstraction. But nearby are images such as “Blue Symphony,” part of a triptych of differing styles, in which it is the sky that is broken into geometric forms behind the curvilinear plant life.

Janell James, “Punctuating the Blue”

Strictly speaking, all art is abstract: that is, a painting of a tree is almost certain to be smaller, flatter, and show fewer details than the original. So it’s part of the impact, both intellectual and emotional, of these portraits of trees that they capture so much of the presence and memory—the lived experience—of trees in nature. When she’s not diagramming silhouette and background, or breaking the visual field into tessellations, James’ supple ways of transferring paint from brush to canvas kindle living foliage into the presence of the viewer. But in addition to her classical artistry, and her analysis of it through abstraction, there is a naturalist at work here as well. In “Only One Pando,” what looks to be a grove of trees is actually a small part of Pando, a single tree with an estimated 47,000 stems or trunks that spreads over 106 acres (“Pando” being Latin for “I spread”) and weighs an estimated 13.2 million pounds, making it the world’s largest tree, and possibly its largest living thing.

Pando, having lived in what would eventually become Utah for countless thousands of years, is now succumbing to the same human-caused environmental changes that are drying up the Great Salt Lake. There’s not a lot of comfort in knowing that artists are preserving these irreplaceable wonders, but we may hope that their works will inspire efforts to preserve and protect them.

Janell James, “Only One Pando”

Janell James: Portraits of Trees, Early Works 2009–2015, ONE Modern Art, Salt Lake City, through August 15.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.