"It does need to have a narrative or a message, even if it's very subtle. I am mindful of this and choose to view it as a challenge to explore certain themes and color combinations that my studio work does not."
"I often start by drawing proportionally correct figures before stripping them back to the rawest form or most simplified version. Through sketching, happy accidents occur, which often help me direct the content or composition. Certain lines tend to stand out for me to then manipulate and abstract further. Eventually, this process is ripping the content apart and then rebuilding its core elements in an abstract way."
James Reka finds freedom in studio practice but gravitates toward public art and site-specific murals. He researches the history of buildings and neighborhoods when conceptualizing murals and welcomes the constraints of geographic and cultural contexts. Reka renders minimalist, geometric shapes into dense compositions that emphasize layered color, movement, and architectural elements such as windows or piping. His recent work trends toward abstraction, often beginning with proportionally correct figures that are stripped back and rebuilt through sketching, happy accidents, and manipulation of lines to distill core elements into abstracted forms. Reka prepares for a solo show in Melbourne and shares projects on Instagram.
Read at Colossal
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]