School Days 2020

Curator: This is Jammie Holmes’s “School Days” from 2020, created using acrylic paint on canvas. Editor: Right off, I get a poignant feeling, like peering into a half-remembered childhood. It’s sketchy, evocative, raw even. Makes me think about time and memory. Curator: Holmes's style blends a kind of raw figuration with social commentary. The naivety, what some might call it, belies a critical engagement with contemporary culture and a nod toward traditions of history painting. He focuses on figuration, as you can see, foregrounding social settings and narratives, and in this case two figures that are presumably school-aged children. Editor: I love how he uses these very muted tones juxtaposed with such deliberate mark-making. Like, you get this sense of place without it being literal at all. Those dice on the table, though... it's more than just kids playing outside, isn't it? Curator: I agree, I think the use of those materials like acrylic situates his practice firmly within a contemporary moment. I feel that his works often explore social realism, the work depicts subjects relevant to the artist. With the background setting featuring humble housing and foreground action being a game with apparent stakes, Holmes is not afraid to approach charged topics within his immediate surroundings. Editor: The layering creates this sense of history pressing down. It feels like more than one story is trying to escape the canvas. There is something so heavy in his expression while his dice are cast like chance, destiny. Maybe an allusion to the luck these figures will face in life. Curator: That's a really compelling reading. It highlights something about the interplay between individual agency and structural constraints—how these children navigate a system where the odds are often stacked against them. Holmes seems keenly aware of this. Editor: Looking closer, it hits me…the faces. The intensity, those solemn expressions are in stark contrast to the almost child-like way the rest of the scene is depicted. You see a whole lifetime of worries pressing into those little faces. Beautiful and devastating. Curator: Absolutely, and the seemingly nonchalant, off-hand way of rendering things—the fleeting scribbles, erasures, revisions all speak to a deep consideration on how one composes works about these subjects in particular. Editor: This piece feels like a potent mix of nostalgia and unease; Jammie Holmes doesn’t just depict childhood, he dissects it. Curator: Right, the social commentary wrapped in a package of acrylics, the naive forms adding an additional critical lens—that is the genius behind a work such as “School Days.”