What can people expect from your new series? Is it a departure from your previous work?

Jay Miriam – People can expect to see bold mark making, vibrant color palettes, distortion of the figure, and expression that I always try to project in my work. In that way, the hand has not changed, but the circumstance and the eye in this series is a departure from my usual mode of working from imagination. In this series, over the course of eight weeks in January and February, eleven women came to the studio to pose for portraits. Of the eleven women six were strangers and 5 were close friends. It was a beautiful process and it felt like a mutual creation between muse and painter. We worked together to plan a pose, and it was important for it to be something natural. The way we worked varied based on the pose and personal preference, some wanted to take a break every 2 minutes, whereas others were okay to pose until they decided for a break. Just that process alone changes how each Muse was painted, because after each break nobody will take the exact same pose, and so you have a leg that was on the left and now it’s more to the right. These organic movements allowed for the painting to evolve into itself, as the passage of time decided where the leg will finally rest.

Jay Miriam – I’m very excited to work with the team at Wolfgang Gallery — a contemporary art gallery located in Atlanta, GA., which was founded in 2022 by Benjamin Deaton and Anna King. Initially I met Benjamin in 2019, he came by for a studio visit while I was secretly pregnant with my daughter, ha ha ha. During our visit I realized Benjamin has an inherent talent for seeing art, his taste and his extensive knowledge of contemporary and historical art were incredibly impressive. We kept in touch during Covid, and as Benjamin knew, I was in an almost two year complete quarantine due to my daughter’s medical condition. And so when Benjamin approached me for a solo exhibition, I immediately knew I wanted the works to be from life.

Many people who enter galleries for a show are new to art or dilettantes and anxiously rush for the wine line while they figure out their next move and hope to see a familiar face. As an artist, what is your mindset when you enter a gallery to see new works? Where would you like a person’s eye and mind to go when they view your paintings?

Jay Miriam – When I go to a gallery I always feel like a little kid who is about to enter a candy store, especially if the exhibition has works by an artist I admire and whose career I follow. To be able to see the works up close changes everything: the scale, the texture, to be able to walk towards and away from, seeing an artwork takes time and the more you look, the greater your understanding and bond with the work is. In my paintings I would like the person’s eye to move around the entire canvas, and then to form a visual map of bridges that link various brush strokes and colors. At least that’s how I paint, for instance; I may place a cool red between a blue and yellow, so that the color transition between a cool and warm isn’t as jarring to the eye. And that is the purpose of the red there. If that makes sense. Every color exists because it has to find a place of harmony in relation to every other color, and together, they form the composition.

Jay Miriam – There is so much emotion associated with putting a show together, it’s definitely comparable to riding a wooden roller coaster. To start, I’ve always built and prepared my own canvases. I’ll get the stretcher bars, and then make a trip to the Garment District for raw linen, after I stretch the linen on the the bars I do a light coat of water for each, and then three coats of gesso, with sanding between each coat. In this part alone I am incredibly stressed because linen is an organic material. Once it gets into contact with water it absorbs and particles can compress, causing the pressure of the linen to interact with the wood. If too much water, the linen will sag. After this, if the preparation was a success, I start to map out how I would like the composition to be. Sometimes I make drawings, but mostly I map everything in my head. And strangely this part is done in a visual black and white, just the composition, I think about where there should be action and where there should be breathing room for the eye. So much goes into making one painting, so much time, emotion, and planning. In the end, I know it’s ready when the emotion is there. This is a challenging question, but in this case, painters have to follow their gut, otherwise they can work on the same painting forever and eventually go mad.Is a painting ever really finished?

Jay Miriam – For me, yes, and once I realize the work is finished I don’t dare touch it.As an expressionist, you take the real and paint it into your own version of reality. Does this method carry into your everyday life? Are your paintings an expression of what existing is for you?My paintings are a mix of 50% reality and 50% of what I wish reality were to be. Everything in my life is inspiration for the paintings, but not everything in my life is funny, and having an element of humor in the works is important.

Jay Miriam – Yes, and to answer your question I may go on a side tangent here but bare with me. Many people are taught from an early
age to gauge their inner X (success, beauty, intelligence) in comparison, and with validation from, the outside world (peers, institutions, etc). We’ve been doing this for thousands of years, as we all know Ancient Greece was obsessed with beauty, just from the sheer number of mirrors found in Greek graves, to Socrates famously confounding how a beautiful Greek should look (hairy back and pot belly, by the way). The idea of perfection and it’s cousin, beauty, are words that have little to no meaning if we strip them of their fantastical and invented philosophy. Even more if we silence ourselves to the voices of the outside, telling us how we ‘should’ be, and begin to focus on how we want to be.

How long does an oil painting take to create? Jay Miriam – It really depends on the work, but on average 3 months to one year.You also mix your own colors with oil paint. How did you learn to do this?
After I finished my undergraduate degree I moved back to Greenpoint, got a full time job, and was really broke. Basically after I calculated rent, utilities, expenses, etc. I only had enough money to pay for an X amount of paint tubes per month. So if I wanted a specific color, I would have to make it, or wait another 30 days to buy it. I still paint this way, and rather than using any color from the tube, I mix 3 or 4 colors together to get to the final result. This is also why most of my paintings have their own color palette, unless I am working on a series.As an artist, once you sell a painting it’s gone. I imagine the process of creating must produce a sort of bond between you and your work. Do they stay with you after they are sold? Like a lost friend, you think of from time to time? One hundred per cent. So much time and emotion is given to each painting, even after years, I can still remember which part of the painting I struggled with, versus which came more easily. I remember all of my paintings, they’re visual diary entries to my lifeline.