James Brinsfield has been busy in the studio this year. He has made several new paintings on paper (17" x 14") and sometimes they are a basis to loosely scale up to a big canvas painting. Here, "Echoplex" from early 2020 - perhaps a bit assertive and shocking at a large scale (6.5 ft x 5.2 ft on the right) versus a related work on paper, reference the second row and the second from the left artwork in the group of paintings on paper.
What is "Echoplex" you may ask? James explains: "I believe in abstraction’s capacity for metaphor. The original Echoplex was invented in the 1950s. In it’s earliest form it was a vacuum tube tape transport system with an adjustable recording head. What it did was take the original recorded signal and delay it creating an echo when overlayed in the recording process. The machine and it’s later solid state iterations were used by electric guitarists from Carl Perkins to Jimmy Page to avant-gardist Sonny Sharrock.
The painting takes that idea of mirroring and transformation into a visual composition."