“For me,” says artist James Lavadour, “painting is an acquisition of knowledge. I get emotional about what I see and discover, but it’s not an expression of my emotions. My process, I guess, is a transfiguration of nature, taking it from one state into another state, you know, and expanding on that.”
It’s a process and an approach that began when Lavadour, now 75, was still a young man. A pivotal moment, he recalls, came as he was outdoors thinking about the dynamism of water and trying to visualize it. That’s when he spotted a long branch sticking out of a logjam.
“When I held on to the branch, I could feel the vibration of the flow of the water coming up the branch. I realized it was energy, and that was a very enlightening awareness for me because then I started thinking of an artist as an energetic force rather than a representative force of pictures and myths and didactic ideas. It was something else, like music.”…