Traveler 2018

James Jean gave us this fantasy scene, Traveler, and the way he's put it together feels both dreamlike and highly constructed at the same time. Look at the surface texture, how he builds up these thin layers of color, kind of like glazing, to make the colors glow. It’s a very studied technique, but it's also kind of psychedelic. The whole thing vibrates. Everything is in bloom, even the Unicorn seems to be sprouting flowers. I love how the narrative is ambiguous, is this a vision? Is it a memory? The way Jean combines the hyper-real with the totally unreal is what makes the work so special, like Odilon Redon or maybe even Hilma af Klint. The mark-making and careful building up of pigment, makes it more than just illustration, it makes it, well, art.