James Jamie Nares | High Speed Cone Graphs

Over the past several decades, Nares has often reimagined the acts of painting and drawing, using custom, handmade tools and heavy machinery to generate singularly expressive works of abstraction. The four photogravure portfolios High Speed Cone Graphs 1-4, beginning with Durham Press in 2018, continue to explore new modes of mark making.

Featuring dynamic curving lines, High Speed Cone Graphs possess a sense of immediacy that belies the complex processes of their creation. In 2014 Nares began producing related works in her studio called "high speed drawings" by tightly wrapping sheets of paper onto a motorized metal drum. As the cylinder turned on its axis, the artist used brushes of her own design to feed ink onto the page in dashes and solid lines of various weights. The resulting large-scale compositions, oriented either vertically or horizontally, evoke intense, unidirectional motion.

Just as Nares' high speed drawings reveal how mechanical action interacts with her own hand, her series of photogravures with Durham Press, titled High Speed Cone Graphs, furthers that exploration by adding a new variable to alter her line: angle. To achieve this, large scale conical drums with angles ranging from zero to ninety degrees were conceptualized and fabricated at Durham Press. Meticulously crafted from plaster sanded to a smooth surface over a wood and wire mesh structure, these pitched cones allow Nares to explore how her process used in high speed drawings transforms with this new form of mechanical intervention. The resulting paintings produce lines that are not only precise and concentric but also soft and gestural, bending in new arcs as she paints along each different degree.