The activity of drawing is primary to Jimbo Blachly’s work. In addition to individual drawings and watercolors, he has kept daily notebooks and sketchbooks which make up a large visual diary going back decades. Blachly states: “The responsiveness of line and mark making to the fluidity of thought. The economy of means-ink and reed pen or pencil and the compact portability of small notebooks means I am almost never without the ability to draw or make a quick notation in my day-to-day life. Drawing for me is a mirror, reflecting the relationship between the perceiving mind, the hand and the myriad phenomena be it oak leaves, mosquitoes, memories or burning forests ”
Over the past several years Blachly has frequently focused on the parks near his home in upper Manhattan. His paintings, notebooks, watercolors and small objects reflect his ongoing exploration of the genre of landscape and examines a variety of approaches to notions of representation and abstraction.
“I am continually searching for an intimate correspondence between the landscape and myself. There is an attempt to record both a sense of time and an aspect of space. A desire to create a marker, memento or token of an experience of a particular place/situation that also opens out to a generalized experience in this ecologically fraught time.”
In addition to direct visual observation, auditory information, time of day (or night), weather, etc…, art history, music theory and contemporary poetics also function as prompts for Blachly’s process.
Jimbo Blachly (b. 1961) is an artist living in New York City, his installations, performances and objects have been exhibited at the Drawing Center, Franklin Furnace, The New Museum, P.S.1 MOMA, The SculptureCenter in N.Y.C. and Catherine Clark gallery in San Francisco. Blachly participated in The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions program 2014-2016 cycle. In 2011 he had an exhibition of his paintings at Winkleman Gallery in New York.
Between 2004 and 2014 he was co-editor of The Chadwick Family Papers with the poet Lytle Shaw.They presented their work in exhibitions at ICA and Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia; Wavehill in the Bronx; N.Y. P.S.1 MOMA; Museum of Art And Design NY; MCA, Denver; The Tate Gallery, London; Kunsthall KadE, Amersfoort, Netherlands; and, Winkleman Gallery in NYC.
Lytle and Jimbo’s book: The Chadwick Family Papers (a Brief public Glimpse) was published in 2009 from Periscope Press. Selected Shipwrecks was published in 2012 from Southern Exposure, SF/ Bookhorse, Zurich, Switzerland.
His work is included the Collections of: Beinecke Library, Yale University; Butler Library, Columbia University; Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library; Fine Arts Library, Harvard University; Newberry Library, Chicago; Special Collections, Amherst College Library
A limited edition book of his drawings is set to be published in 2021.
August 2021