Paintings by Jim Wainscott

Opening Friday, April 4, 2003, the Cincinnati Arts Association's Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts presents two new exhibitions: Inner Gardens, an elegant series of landscape paintings by Deborah Morrissey-McGoff that reflects on personal space and our intricate relationship with the natural world; and Paintings by Jim Wainscott, a survey of the artist’s meticulously painted enigmatic figurative and landscape paintings.

In a career spanning more than twenty-five years, Jim Wainscott, an acclaimed and well-recognized painter within the Cincinnati arts community, has produced a distinguished body of meticulously rendered acrylic paintings that combine both traditional and contemporary painting techniques with his interest in the figure and landscape. Painstakingly applied translucent layers of paint on wood panels achieve an enigmatic effect that transforms these paintings into dreamlike visions. Wainscott’s laborious and time-intensive process of building his paintings through multiple layers of polymer medium creates a seductive glass-like surface that lures the viewer. The artist will often spend up to six months on one painting. Because of his intentionally slow production, Wainscott’s exhibition affords a unique opportunity to the public as it represents a mini-retrospective of sorts, incorporating paintings that have been completed in the past fifteen years.

Jim Wainscott received a bachelor of arts in 1969 and a master of fine arts in painting in 1973 from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Ky. Since that time he has devoted himself full time to his painting, exhibiting his work in numerous regional and national venues including a one-person exhibition at Gallery 2211 in Los Angeles in 2002. His paintings are represented in numerous private and corporate collections.