James Chaffee

The Sacramento Bee,
Sacramento, California, April 10, 2005

COLOR HIM CREATIVE
Hints of other artists, vibrant tones
energize James Chaffee's figures

Author: Victoria Dalkey
Bee Art Correspondent

A show of strong figure paintings by James Chaffee at the John Natsoulas Gallery Annex demonstrates that the tradition of Bay Area Figurative painting is alive and well. While Chaffee's vibrant oil paintings show the influence of Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and Nathan Oliveira, they have their own individuality characterized by an intuitive and luscious sense of color.

Hovering between abstraction and representation, his figures emerge from fields of wet, juicily expressive brush strokes and radiant, unpredictable color. In "Figure and Color," he gives us a Diebenkorn-like composition with a female figure looking out on a landscape with an improbably bright yellow sky. The figure, which has affinities in its flatness with paintings by Alex Katz, assumes the role of a viewer within the painting viewing the painting she is in. Chaffee plays with the landscape, introducing purely abstract forms that enliven the composition.

Nodding to Bischoff with its romantic red sky, "Two Figures in Landscape" presents a pair of male figures on a lonely beach, bathed in a murky symbolic light. A painting of a woman in a striped skirt seated on a love seat with her arm around an absent lover, on the other hand, is a quirky image that seems wholly original. Full of brilliant color, ranging from the woman's red legs to a blush of rose that activates the space behind her, it's a stunning painting.

Also completely Chaffee's own is "Figure in Blue." In it, the figure herself is blue, a vibrantly aggressive personage whose blouse becomes an exciting abstract painting in itself. Playing a cold blue against a hot salmon background, Chaffee gives us a bold color statement that also evokes emotions ranging from cold rage to sadness. As is the case in all of his paintings, the faceless figure is universal, a presence rather than a personality.

Ranging beyond the Bay Area Figurative School, there are touches of Pierre Bonnard in a charming painting of a rosy nude seated on a patchwork coverlet in a bedroom interior whose blue window and green furniture bring the outdoors in. And there are echoes of Milton Avery in the delicate colors and almost subliminal forms of "Standing Figure." In contrast, "Dance" is a large and freewheeling painting of a figure in a verdant landscape that is intriguing but a bit unresolved. In it and a small painting of a nude in a landscape, the drawing of the figure is a bit soggy, suggesting that Chaffee would benefit with working with a live model instead of relying on his imagination.

Unfortunately, the paintings hung in the entryway to the annex - a rough-hewn log cabin kitty-cornered from the main Natsoulas Gallery - are pretty much impossible to judge. They are too large for the space and have to fight too hard against the funky wooden walls of the dilapidated structure, which seem to be almost decomposing.

Nevertheless, Chaffee's show is a winner. The artist, who worked as an illustrator in The Bee's art department for 20 years before retiring a few years ago, is unabashedly in love with paint and revels in its physical properties. Chaffee's obvious joy in the act of painting shines through in these works, whose energy and vitality are infectious.