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James Grant, in a one-man show of recent paintings at the Pasadena Art Museum, is capitalizing on gains already made in painting. Like Chuey, a member of the emerging generation of California artists, Grant is rapidly establishing a niche for himself here. An incisive draftsman, Grant appears to be swung into action by the way in which linear pathways can be made to unfold one from another. He favors still-life, plant and flower forms, and skulls of cattle as sources for linear embellishment. This usually takes the form of an electric black line moving in staccato rhythms, now spun into skeined networks, now jagged and spicular, now blurring at the edges as if slipping away into the enveloping atmosphere. That atmosphere is saturated in vibrant color, the foil for line. The resulting imagery is a sort of Californa variation of Sutherland.

What Grant does he does with authority. Yet I never managed to establish a raport with these assertions. For one thing, Grant is exploiting a style rapidly being depleted by the number of its practioners He uses his devices with skill and assurance, but for this observer they remained devices.

Francesco di Cocco, James Grant, Jon Drummer:
Grant is a West Coast artist, only two of whose works had arrived in time for review. They indicated an unsettled sensibility in which coruscating lines barely make connection with the cavernous images of irregular forms. (Schaefer, Sept. 1 - Oct. 3)

James Grant, who is about to embark for Rome, is showing recent Abstract-Expressionist oils at the Upstairs Gallery of the University of Southern California. Grant's previously diffuse talents have coalesced in these virile and spirited paintings. In works of the caliber of Construction, organic shapes spring into a life of their own. In Black Image the thrust and counterthrust of forms exert compelling force. There is no gainsaying the turbulent energy of these Grant paintings, but it is energy fully at his command.

There is a distinctly modern note about the paintings of James Grant, a guest exhibitor from California at the Grand Central Moderns, and their concern with form and space. But though structure figures with substance in his painting, his compositions are distinctive in color and involve some curiously high-keyed combinations. The clustered shapes of the exhibits otherwise show a clear unity and marshal poetic objects in massive compositions.

James Grant [Grand Central Moderns], young Californian who has shown widely in his native state, insists on the outsize canvas, each taking its impulse from a slight formal detail in the painting -- three bars of white, a pink circle -- which is presently submerged in the collision of aggressive inchoate shapes. A swooping, smeared paint defines the surface. In collages of a richer tonality and texture, Grant is compelled -- perhaps by the resistance of his superimposed burlap - to forms more discrete and to effects at once more arresting and more harmonious. Prices unquoted.

James Grant: Without any tendency to "return to the figure," this Los Angeles painter nonetheles shows a lot of similarity with the Diebenkorn group and other Coast artists like Joan Brown and sister Mary Corita. The big color planes are freely delineated and restated over and over. They seem to be repeating words like "solidity" until we wonder whom they want to convince. What is really desired seems to be a kind of solemnity that is only approached in the smallest (still large) oil, Two Blue Lines. It has more diversity within economy and unity, than any other. The handsome pieces, like Dotted Red, seem to overuse a designer's repetition of shapes and bright (but too simple) colors. Two Blue Lines has more sissonant green and violet irregularity, and does something to disturb the fat attitude of California well-being, which appears more and more in Grant's work. (Grand Central Moderns, Feb. 7-Mar. 2)

In the gallery between the Bothwell works and the Genns, there is a large and wonderful series of abstract canvases by James Grant, a Southern Californian who has recently moved to the Bay Area. Grant works in mixed media, mostly flat oil color and burlap collage, and his best pieces are fairly large. It is hard to come up with an explanation of why these works are so stunning, but in this quantity, close together, they are simply overwhelming.

The colors are dark and brooding, the shapes are globular, introverted, self-contained, and clearly defined. It is quite obvious that Grant is painstaking and deliberate in the way he builds up color intensitities and contrasts. His blues sing, his blacks scowl, the browns and grays have the solidity of earth. Also the heavy texture of raw or painted burlap and the slickness of paper, broadens the gamut of color tone in an extremely eye-pleasing way.

As one can see from the illustration, Grant's works do not lose all their zing and punch in black-and-white, even though they are far more gratifying in color.

This is an indication that Grant's paintings have content as well as impact -- a quality which is increasingly rare in abstract painting.

James Grant [Grand Central Moderns]; Oct. 19 - Nov. 7] is a California painter recently given a one-man show at the de Young Museum in San Franciso. His soporific collages are, with one incongruous exception, small in size; the delicately-cut shapes of the pieces of paper and cheesecloth are bland; and the inoffensive dark pastels are neutralized further with patches of ocher and grey.

A large painting and several small ones are composed of patches of texture and a few even areas -- which is a conventional contrast. The compsition looks fairly Expressionistic at first but is careful. The color is softened to produe a bluish-gray or brownish haze. (Grand Central Moderns, Oct. 19-Nov. 7)

Mr. Grant's collage-paintings have been devised with considerable intellectuality, subserved by a subtle and consummate craftsmanship. Variations in surface are "structural" and topologically architectonic rather than sensuous. Mr. Grant denies that his works have conscious reference to nature or to "landscape." The larger canvases, however, seem abstractly "panoramic" as though, through the window of a space vehicle, one were viewing the mysterious topology and chemistry of spectacular configurations in some unearthly terrain. This effect is heightened by the fact that these works have no "compositional" cohesion either in syntactical terms or with reference to the rectangle of the canvas. Varying thicknesses of pigmented burlap, in conjunction with unique dispositions of colormass and shape, are employed to create an eerie space of peculiarly "fractured" stereoscopic dimensionalities. The smaller works have more immediate impact as a totality. Although still not a "frame of composition," the picture rectangle here functions dynamically as a compressive barrier against which the "active space," conjured by Mr. Grant's methods, seems to be expanding, as energies of tremendous velocity, colliding with explosive force, are propelled toward the viewer.

These exhibits provide interesting contrasts in macrocosm and microcosm. The rather sophisticated "function-theoretical" esthetic of this work is unique. Mr. Grant has devised an idiom that seems to impart visible embodiment to quite mathematically conceived modalities of abstractly contemplated energy and space. It was, therefore, not surprising to find that he had a rather intensive and accomplished background in the physical sciences before turning to art as a career.

James Grant (Grand Central Moderns, 8 W. 56th): Abstract collage paintings, delicately contrived but structurally rugged, reveal earth images like geological cross-sections, so imaginative as to suggest plans for terrestial renovations. And it would be safe to entrust alterations to Grant, for he promises an environment tasteful and pleasant, though lacking some of the surprise of earth as it is.

Three of the 76 pictures in Mary Washington Colelge's eighth annual exhibition of modern art, which was reviewed here last week, have been added to the college's permanent collection. A jury of five faculty members chose "Collage in Yellow" by James Grant, one of the most dynamic pictures in the exhibition; "Trees," a watercolor by Norfolk-born Robert Andrew Parker, and "Nude," by internationally known painter Nicholas Vasilieff.

A Californian by birth, Grant has had a one man show in Rome as well as in American galleries.

The syncopated plastic rhythms, sharp spatial transitions, and "dissonantly" juxtaposed shapes and color contrasts that so strongly characterized Mr. Grant's collage-paintings, exhibited a year ago at the de Young Museum, are nowhere to be found in his current show. He has, to be sure, retained a few stylistic mannerisms from his earlier work, but the vitality has considerably waned. Most of the recent work here shown essays related colors in like tonal values; colormasses and linear configurations are distributed in such a way that each work is a study in composed static equilibrium and tonal blending. Contrary to Grant's earlier practice, collage effects are employed texturally rather than structurally and do not violently corrugate the picture surface. These paintings come perilously close to a familiar decorative degeneration of Abstract Expressionist methods. It is difficult to explain such a shift of outlook in an artist who has shown a high caliber of daring, explorative imagination.

At the Hansen Gallery, in Tillman Plaza, San Francisco's James Grant is showing abstract paintings that offer sharply individual ideas of texture, image and color, in a modern plastic paint medium.

In the paintings by James Grant, the smooth-glazed or gritty sand surfaces, novel colorations and relief protrusions, diversities and rhythms represent an avant-garde spirit that is brash as well as deeply sensitive. In the range from wildish color to atmospheric thought, Grant also is something of a visual poet.

James Grant, who is showing at the Hansen Galleries, 14 Tillman place, is also an abstract painter, and one who has invented a highly effective style of his own.

His works are really collages, employing large, irregular shapes in differing textures of canvas, burlap, and other kinds of cloth. these are further enhanced in texture with all manner of paints and plastics; the color is on the richly somber side, with deep earthy greens, browns, and warm tones in general, scaled very low. The forms seem constantly in movement, as if the picture frame were a mere incidental convenience to hold things together and not a boundary line. The total effect of these paintings is rather like the abstraction of fields and rivers seen from a great height -- not the direct or specific experience of such seeing, but the essenc of it after the full and thoughtful pondering of its pictorial possibilities.

At the Hansen Gallery, James Grant is showing new work in which he has taken molds of such real objects as manhole covers, egg crates, shot glasses, etc., and has cast them in polyester resin. These transformations are immediately suggestive of huge ceramic pieces. The process of infusing color into the plastic leads to color separations very similar to those that potters have obtained in the kiln heretofore. Difficulties in a change of color along a firm edge necessitated forming these pieces in separate parts and fusing them together. Though these pieces are actually a mosaic of parts they are firmly joined, and some of the most felicitous distortions are probably the result of the process of fusing together. The color goes all the way through rather than being painted on the surface. The found object is molded for the casting, but the object itself is left to cover its manhole, or whatever, giving the artist a much wider range of findable objects. The plastic seems to have no real material characteristics of its own. Parts of these wall reliefs are cast from cement and the grain and quality of cement is faithfully reproduced. Only a short time ago the "integrity of the material" was a favorite critical and pedagogical cliche, but the artists are now, in increasing numbers, appropriating the commercial manufacturer's penchant for using synthetics to reproduce the apearance of things (wood grain, linoleum or formica, for instance). Many of Grant's forms are cast from found objects which are themselves castings, cast iron being his favorite.

One of the more spectacular and informative group exhibitions of the current San Francisco season was a show entitled Plastics West Coast, organized at the Hansen Gallery. Intended as a general introduction to a series of one-man shows projected by the gallery, the ambitious exhibition surveys West Coast artists working with various of the synthetic materials derived from polymer chemistry and popularly classified as plastics. The range of processes encompassed is impressive.

Recently there has emerged a considerable group of artists who have become "plastics craftsmen" in a fundamental sense, who have, that is to say, gone far beyond merely making things out of plastic materials as already industrially processed and available in sheets, cans or tubes at the hardware store. Such procedure alone (called "fabricating" in the new jargon of "plasticraft," to which the gallery has provided its visitors with a useful mimeographed glossary) is not novel, nor would it, at this late date, merit a survey exhibition. The new pioneer of plasticraft has invaded a domain which the fabricator was content to leave to the laboratory and the foundry, for not only is he becoming a chemical technician and mastering the theory and routine of already established procedures for producing and procesing polymers, but he is actually experimenting and, in some cases, innovating techniques and potentially useful modfications not hitherto explored in commercial applications. While the exposition and illustration of technology and process, and of novel uses of novel materials is a large part of the fascination and broad general appeal of this exhibition, lines must be drawn as between matters of scientific and artistic interest. Polymer substances and processes in themselves are artistically significant solely insofar as they provide artists with a repertoire of effects, the achievement of which with traditional materials would be either impossible or prohibitively difficult and unecomnomical; they are only technically significant where they merely afford shortcuts (or mass production possibilities) to effects demonstrably within the practicable scope of time-honored media.

"Small Images from San Francisco," the second installation at the San Pedro Municpal Art Gallery, is a provocative potpourri. The sampling of 63 works by nine artists provides a pinch each of drawing, painting, graphics and sculpture for wall, floor or table top.

[...]

James Grant presents long needles of colored, layered polyester. Two, translucent, have the flavor of the fabled pousse-cafe. In the other two, the opaque colored stripes are like those on an Italian sikl scarf.

S.F.'s James Grant in spattered white in a white room under a black-cone light shares space with an easel. His multiple striped precision piece, "Black Balancing Rod," turns and dips at a touch

Never thought there was truth to the rumor that we have a secret cultural embargo against San Francisco. Even if we did, it has been lifted for the "Sixteen from San Francisco" exhibition in the new Municpal Art Gallery in San Pedro.

[...]

The most eloquent and original works on view seem to me those that are most clearly "Funk." They are by James Grant, Dave Melchert, William Morehouse, Mel Henderson and Dave Gilhooley.

"Plastics/1969" at the San Pedro Municipal Art Gallery is not only a very lovely show, it is a significant one. Work in plastic has been for about five years in all kinds of shows. Seen alongside works in conventional materials, the plastics are jarring. Seen together, they have an integral harmony.

On the way back from the show, I wondered how to put into words the feelings and reactions it had engendered. Then, driving over the longitudinal and vertical curves of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, with the improbably pastel Union Oil tank farm on the left and the equally improbable boxes on the oil islands to the right, everything seemed to fit together.

The plastics, explored honestly, as they are in this show, are a whole new world. Plastics made to iminitate something else, wood veneer, drinking glasses, marble, etc. are aesthetically disquieting. These 22 works are new expressions in the new materials.

[...]

James Grant moulded a 12-foot long sheet of fibreglass like a cresting ocean roller, and poured marine blue over it in dribbles.

James Grant, the San Francisco sculptor whose works were exhibited in the "Plastics West Coast" show at the Seligman Gallery last year, is now being featured in a one-man show at Seligman which runs through May 28.

Grant's large upright wheels and balancing horns are made of highly polished plastic in an array of lush popsicle colors combined with gray.

While the large wheels seem primarily mechanical, the forms of the balancing horns and other stationary upright horns seem directly inspired by the shape of real animal horns, although their colors are as fanciful as the unicorn.

A gifted colorist who is vastly concerned with the effects of light behind translucent forms, Grant has emphasized the unique properties of his medium.

Composed of the most modern and experimental material available, Grant's sculpture has an elegant simplicity and compactness which is essentially classic.

By transmitting light even the largest wheels, which appear to be more than two feet in diameter, suggest a minimum of weight while the balancing forms several feet long can be tipped and rotated so smoothly and soundlessly that they seem deceptively light.

Grant's method in many of these works was to cast a thin shell of polyester resin around a urethane core. He also uses a lathe for cutting concentric circles when needed and for sanding and polishing. The hardening process is one of the most crucial stages, and if this occurs too rapidly, the plastic can ignite.

Among Grant's most exciting works is a large dark wheel with a thin hard-edge circle of translucent burgundy red. Inside of this is an assortment of cut-off rods delicately colored and slightly bent. As light filters through this substance, the center takes on overtones of organic life.

Several of Grant's wheels employ opaque and translucent colors aranged in emblematic forms. His improvisations also include a solid color form with a linear pattern etched on the surface and a large cube with layers of translucent color sandwiched between opaque white.

James Grant has had one-man shows at Grand Central Moderns in New York City, Galleria Pogliani in Rome, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. He received a purchase award in the Art Across America competition in 1966.

James Grant's exhibition at the Mills College Art Gallery surveys 12 years of this artist's output and at least 20 years of Bay Region art in general. To be sure, not everybody hereabouts has moved from painting to sculpture, but Grant's progress, in addition to its change in materials has gone from complete freedom to rigorous discipline, and many of his colleagues are traveling the same road. The distinctive thing about Grant is that his effort is absolutely first-rate at every stage.

At the start, he was an Abstract Expressionist, and one of the best in the business. He seems to have tried several of the Abstract Expressionist modes, but he particularly favored large irregularly shaped islands of color, frequently quite somber in deep grays and blacks, with heavy emphasis on varied textures obtained with the collage of woven stuffs, sand, built-up paint, and whatnot.

Gradually, as you follow the development of Grant's style, you can see the third dimension taking over until he stops painting altogether, at least with a brush, and turns out large reliefs formed by impressing dotted, studded, starred and other textured surface into polyester resin and enriching the result with a heavy sauce of color.

Finally, he abandons that for free-standing sculpture in plastics: targets made by pouring concentric circles of color, often of extraordinarily dramatic size; long poles of plastic laminations swiveling horizontally; vertical monuments; discs that seem to be distillations of exquisitely colored light shot full of subtle flashes that open, startlingly, into totally new dimensions both spatially and chromatically.

Grant has become a great virtuoso of plastics -- how they diffuse light and form; how, on the other hand, they can be made to concentrate them; how they can be made as dense as polished rock, and how they can take off into the air and seemingly dissolve into their surroundings as you look at them.

These plastics sculptures by James Grant are beautiful things, but so are his paintings and his reliefs. Usually a retrospective show by a relatively young artist increases in quality as it moves along toward the present. Grant's quality has always been so high that no such accretion of value is evident. He has been good since he started. That's not true of too many of the Bay Region art community.

This month's April Art Action at the San Francisco Museum of Art includes two tours. [...] The studio tour, "Plastics in Process," will be presented between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Wednesday. Open to the public will be the studios of Freda Koblick, Robert Howard, James Grant, Sam Richardson, Alec Lambie, James Pennuto, Fletcher Benton, Robyn Martin, and Peter Gutkin.

A feature article (5 pages with color photographs) describing the constuction of the large commissioned resin sculpture, Flabellum.

The Triangle is also introducing two new artists to its stable, Gordon Holler and James Grant. Each will have a one-man show at this gallery later on.

The present sampling of Holler doesn't give much idea of the range of his print making, but Grant's big targets and other sculptures in colored plastic are among the most ravishingly beautiful things being made in this country. The Triangle is greatly to be congratulated on having snared this distinguished artist, and it is good to know where his things may be found on display henceforth.

Ah joy! not all contemporary art is a blown up photographic likeness, a punning object, a hole in the ground or simply an idea. A truly beautiful, most ingenious show of painting and sculpture glows and beguiles with light and color a the Berkeley Art Center in Live Oak Park (through July 16).

The inventive artists employ contemporary concepts and materials to please the eye, lift the spirit an dultimately whet the mind.

Guy John Cavelli's many-sided geometric paintings with an illusion of depth and blurred light, are foils for James Grant's glowing, translucent plastic scupture even as the sculpture responds to the paintings. Each could readily stand alone, but the interplay of light, color and form between the two compounds the magic of both.

[...]

James Grant's little altar of light and color are shaped as "wheels" (flattened spheres) and more recently circles within squares or cylinders in blocks. In the darkened gallery they glow from spots above, below or behind, but work very well against the natural light in the entrance hall.

Earlier dazzling wheels are conentric circles of all colors in the spectrum, radiating designs and circles of designs of color squares, rounds and balls ("Circus Wheel"). These kintetically suggestive wheels carnival-like appear about to spin. Later the wheels become luminous and more subtle and invite contemplation.

Possibilities in this concept and medium are fully realized in the hypnotic "Blue wheel with Red Lines." Electic-hot lines waver in series through mysterious, translucent blue depths - a shrine of color and light. (Explore the side to find the red lines actually are the edge of plates suspended within).

A circle within a circle within a square, "Bisected Purple" with its glowing red disc throbbing in a field of purple (from mauve to deep pink), and bisected by a silhouetted clinder goes beyond a Rothko painting in color impact.

"Orange in Blue," facing the entrance shimmering like a mandala image of perfection, on close inspection is transparent and reveals the gallery beyond and from the reverse side the entrance hall. The compelling "Grey Wheel" iridescent at the perimeter in green and blue, on the other hand, reflects the gallery and viewer, too.

Latest works, "block" or "cylinder" pieces intensify the mystery in light. "Blue and White Block," a translucent blue cube is filled with cylinders so touched with white they appear to be pillars of light shining in an icy block.

James Grant, after receving his BA and MFA at USC and study at the Jepson Art Institute, began his career as an abstract painter, went on to relief collage which led to pouring pigmented polyester resin in molds and this present most personal expression in sculpture. Grant came to the Bay Area in '62 after teaching at Pomona and working in Rome.

The two sculptures that will grace the entry-way of the new Downtown Community College Center on the corner of 4th and Mission will be done with and by ECLAT.

ECLAT is Jim Grant and Frank Vigneri. Grant's sculptural design won the commission for the Center's art enrichment in competition with many other leading practitioners of three-dimensional expression.

To Grant's knowledge, this is one of the first times that di-choric treated glass will be used in the execution of major pieces of sculpture. This di-choric process is method of color-coating lenses for use in cameras. In the case of Grant's work, the technique will be applied to sheets of glass. The glass will be cut into three differing triangular sizes. They will be united with stainless steel rods to form the finished pieces.

Each color-coated triangle will respond to the changing light conditions. The eye will be treated to an ever-changing array of reds, blues, oranges, purples, yellows and greens.

Sculptor Grant considers this commission a challenge and a rare opportunity to express his artistic concepts in a new light, airy, sculptural art form.

Born in Los Angeles, Grant studied to become an engineer at USC and later on returned to get his Master of Fine Arts degree.

He painted for 15 years and also taught painting and drawing at Pomona College during the same period.

He became interested in three dimensional art as his paintings evolved.

Grant's work is now completely three dimensional as we will see when the sculptures are installed in the new Downtown Center.

[A picture of Grant's map sculpture, one of a set of four commissioned by AT&T for the lobby of their San Francisco office.]

Our cover photograph is of a cast polyester resin global map created by San Francisco artist James Grant.