Challenges 2020

Jammie Holmes’ painting ‘Challenges’ is built up of brush marks and muted colours. I imagine Holmes in the act of painting, pushing and pulling at the image, resolving and dissolving, until the painting tells him it is done. The painting seems to be a portrait – or is it a genre scene? Or history painting? I like the tilted chess board floor, like something out of Guston. But the rider on the horse – is he going somewhere, or just posing? The rider himself is solid, dark, but the horse is more of an apparition, a set of gestural strokes, a feeling of a horse. Look at that drip of paint, or is it a leg? It is a perfect metaphor for the challenges of painting itself. I can imagine Holmes working hard, trying to fix something that wants to stay open. Painting is like that, a conversation between the hand, the eye, and the heart. Like Barkley Hendricks or Kerry James Marshall, Holmes is part of a long history, always in dialogue with the past.