BIO

Jim Hague grew up in the Midwest and studied painting and art history at Central College in Fayette, Missouri. Jim’s painting instructor Philip Malette was French, trained in the classic tradition of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and a classic fundamentalist who did not encourage expressionism. This dispirited Jim early on, resulting in a lot of scribbling, doodling, and making unrecognizable characters with his pen during the lecture and art appreciation periods of his college instruction. Jim also studied calligraphy under Frank (Sanje) Elliott, renowned calligrapher from Seattle and supplemented his income by writing invitations, announcements, card and envelopes for wealthy individuals and institutions mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. The calligraphy inspired drawings and paintings that Theos creates today, straddle the line between color field and action painting.

Jim has also spent much of his life on a spiritual journey through practices of meditation, massage therapy, and movement and dance. Both his aesthetic as a calligraphy writer and spiritual practices have influenced the work Jim makes today.

It took Jim many years, and several careers related to design and the healing arts to come back to the creative practice of his youth. With the help and encouragement of abstract expressionist painter Abbie Rabinowitz, he began to embrace this form of expression and in the last decade, his career as an artist has become central to his life. Jim describes this return to his creative practice as “the indescribable comfort and satisfaction of doing my own work finally in this lifetime is a reward well worth waiting for”.

Jim divides his time between Hawaii, France and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where he lives and works.

Jim’s work under his name THEOS is in private and institutional collections in San Francisco, Honolulu, Santa Fe, Taos, New York City, Palm Beach, Paris and Munich.

ARTIST STATEMENT

At this stage of my life, I feel released from restraints and free at last to allow the self to express. I have been actively working most of my days since to this end. The work effortlessly flows, like a continuation of the breath.

I use the fluid lines of eastern calligraphy. They blend into their own unique style, their own language or messages.

I consider the beauty of the hand drawn line, whether it’s paint, pencil, chalk, ink or charcoal. Sometimes the elegance of a simple, single line leaves me stunned.

The work is worship. The more I strive to perfect it the closer communion I feel with the creator. What greater gift could there be than to see one’s work as worship?

That’s to say that when I draw or paint I am at prayer. Spirit is the one doing the work.

Sometimes it takes the form of a forgotten, ancient or esoteric language. Not legible as words but as a form of expression. Fields of potential meaning, surfaces where all information may exist in disorder. The work resists a category or label, leaving space for ambiguity, memory and the spaces of transmission.

I am influenced by the artists Agnes Martin, Mark Tobey, Cy Twombly and Vija Celmins to name a few.

There is a duality in this work, of meaning and non meaning. The fields seem devoid of meaningful content, or maybe not. I think of some of them as ‘veiled mysteries’. The viewer can decide.