These paintings are for the next world. The landscapes, atmosphere and life of the next world. A reason to stick around and form the next world. 

Mining the sensations of swimming in the ocean, I aim for a sense of uneasy alertness. The paintings are both of watery ecosystems, but also of the body and an unseen world. I’m part of a rich lineage of queer artists that use their hands and minds to forge a space for strange dualities: kindness and treachery; opulence and desiccation; kinship and solitude.

My current paintings travel between the realms of abstraction and surrealism and are a mental buffer between my work in arts education. From that mental fortress, I paint to mull over the memory of  being strange and the yearning for normality I have often felt. In their essence, my paintings are an investigation of mark-making and color as a way to define my internal space. Often designing a composition around a few dominant colors, I’m interested in creating a fervent conversation between hues. Using a slurry of translucent acrylic and fiber paste layers, I create biological and mechanical forms that flicker in and out of focus; emerging and submerging. I use scraping and sanding as key strategies to knock back that which is solid, and imperfectly reveal the interior of the painting. 

In compositions that begin as a still-life or lake tableaus; I render, then transform intimate moments in my local ecosystem into billowing vascular networks.  My paintings depict self-contained biomes, but also contribute to a life-long world-building project.  As if the paintings themselves were alive, I think of them as kin that converse, quarrel and require tending.  I’m fascinated how a painting can exist as a static image, but upon examination take the viewer through time as we see the remnants of previous layers and compositional edits. I believe we create fantasy worlds as a way to hold our own realities at arm’s length; to get out of the thick of being the main character and soar above life with the clarity of a narrator. My painting practice allows me to hover above — just a bit.

-Jamie Treacy, 2025