Jim Mott’s way of unknowing
Wellesley Island Beach Triptych, detail.
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It’s hard to imagine a less picturesque subject than the Inner Loop, a channel of traffic that circles and threads its way through downtown Rochester. It might be an interesting route for an F1 race at some point, but it wouldn’t strike most painters as a promising place to search for beauty. In Common Ground, an astutely curated show of Jim Mott’s paintings and Andy Smith’s photographs at Lumiere Photo, Mott’s views of the Loop (originally exhibited at RoCo in 2011) serve as an anchor for understanding what he’s up to. Paired with his paintings of the High Falls and the Rochester skyline, these larger paintings, often with wide, panoramic dimensions, offer a wonderful path into Mott’s work in general. The exhibition is more comprehensive than it looks at first glance, with fifty paintings by Mott on view. It essentially serves as a retrospective of his work from the past 20 years.
In Downtown River View, Mott uses office buildings, along with a bridge over the Genesee River, as a way of structuring the image geometrically. At the same time, he relieves the rigor of that grid with the organic shapes of trees along the river banks and the Genesee tumbling across the bottom of the painting. Throughout the image, Mott simplifies what’s being depicted and minimizes his detail, in a sense making as few marks as possible to capture the reflected light that gently illuminates most of the shadowed scene while striking the higher buildings, bringing them into bright relief against a pale blue sky. Mott’s strategy is to leave most of what he sees ill-defined.
Avoiding definition is his way of life in an even broader sense: he doesn’t try to define what he’s doing as a painter. His approach is apophatic: eliminate thinking to make discovery possible. I’ve heard him say, only part joking, many times, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Each time he begins a painting, he relearns how to capture the scene and his approach is never a repeatable series of technical moves; it’s always an improvisation. Mott believes that pushing toward tighter definition MORE