by Lee Roscoe
Jaime Byrd’s paintings are layered, exploring what is beneath the beautiful surface, as well as pleasing the viewer with the image itself.
She begins by inscribing a poem or affirmation on the canvas. (These may be revealed in part when she carves into the painting’s history, but remain mostly private, a way to put more of herself into the picture, enable her to be, as she says, “looser,” when she is creating.) She builds up a painting, layer after layer, by using oil combined with cold wax in a unique technique. The paint sets faster but allows her leeway to change it, unlike fast-setting acrylic. The layers give her work a depth and an ethereal quality of intense glowing, almost glass-like colors. She works on multiple paintings at once, leaving one to set as she paints another. And she can’t work fast enough. They sell even before she finishes each.
The jewel-like quality may well be a result of one of her many successful creative endeavors. She was a jeweler, known (as she is for her paintings too) as a colorist, combining, for instance, green and purple grapes using Swarovski crystals. She is also a potter and brings those tools to “carve dimension” in her canvases. And she is an Emmy-nominated, retired, professional cinematographer and film editor who did commercial, documentary, and music video work. She says, the eye needed to compose a filmic frame—to “paint with light” in film— is useful as well for her “post-impressionist” paintings, which will be on view at Greg Salvatori Gallery beginning this Friday.
She also uses her films literally to bring her two-dimensional art into three dimensions through AR, augmented reality. This makes her paintings, which she considers living, breathing things, come even more alive. With Jaime Byrd’s work, you don’t need to take LSD for a psychedelic experience. All you need is the app, Artivive, downloaded to your phone. Point it at her work, on the wall or on another screen, and you will see and hear clouds moving, light changing, water rushing, birds flying. What is in and under the ground may come to life.
“As a filmmaker, I’m a storyteller. So, for me it’s not ‘oh look, these images can move around,’ but a way to create a deeper emotional connection with the viewer,” she explains. “I spend time considering what triggers which emotions. Sound is big for me. Some of the AR additions have 40 tracks of audio.”
But the pieces stand alone without motion, for they are vivid, magical depictions of a dreamlike natural world, of houses and places both nostalgic and real, somehow on a time arc of past, present, and future, simultaneously.
Her work, she says, is about mystery, that which lies beneath the foundations of the world, its sky, earth, and waters, something beyond the real horizon. People think they see a mountain or water or something underground in her work, but it may be their perception shaping what they discover. Since, she says, nature and people are all basically the same thing, her images of nature are a metaphor for the human condition because they “relate to people as how we are: what we show and what we don’t show. A lot of us don’t want to show what is underneath, and even if we don’t want to express that, it’s quite beautiful. It’s me expressing how we hide a lot of things inside of us, such as trauma, but it’s not as bad as we think it may be,” she says.
Greg Salvatori’s Provincetown gallery will exhibit about 10 Byrd pieces created from photos and videos of Provincetown. She runs two galleries of her own in Asheville, N.C, where she moved from Los Angeles 25 years ago because she “fell in love with the area and wanted a change and better weather” and because some of her family is there. She’s part of a community of fine artists in the River Arts District, 300 artists who work and show their art there—as a companion to the 100-year-old crafts industry Asheville is known for. “We live in a very rural area in the mountains with a lot of acreage” and a red barn, which shows up in her paintings.
She and her husband, who is her manager, migrate to a Mexican mountain town for the winter. She has traveled extensively to, and lived in places such as Bali, Hawaii, Oregon, and many other places for work and pleasure, even walking the Camino de Santiago multiple times—amassing “a whole lot of footage,” she says. Paramount to her life and work is “the tranquility of being immersed in place and nature.” It gives her a fulfilling sense of belonging that she is “a part of the entire world, and we are all connected; energetically, I feel that connection.” She adds, “I have to spend time outdoors, even with a cup of coffee just sitting and watching.”
“If I didn’t do creative work, I would have no purpose,” Byrd says. Her mother was a writer, her father an art teacher, so she grew up in a creative environment and says, “You have to be a little crazy to do this.” Not so crazy; Byrd has a knack for marketing as well as creating. She decided to make the transition from her past successes to painting, and was deliberate about it. “Nothing was accidental,” she says. All she has done has been supported by her husband of 29 years, a retired veterinarian, who has the mantra of “Doing everything to let Jaime stay creative.”
“I’m not an angry artist,” Byrd says. “I want to be a positive force. My art has connected with people on a level I don’t understand. I’m happy that it makes people feel good.”
Augment and Elevate, an exhibition of the work of Jaime Byrd, will be on view June 30 – July 6 at Greg Salvatori Gallery, 366 Commercial St., Provincetown. There will be an opening reception on Friday, June 30, 7 p.m. For more information call 347.399.0875 or visit gregsalvatori.com.
