Artist Research: Jim Mai (Painter/Printmaker)

James Mai

For this artist research I decided to choose another artist from the painter section. It didn't take long to find another artist who caught my attention. This time it was Jim Mai who does mathematical art works that focus on geometric composition or illusion as well as color relativity. He is currently a professor of art at Illinois State University where he both teaches his theories and continues to produce works of his own.

This style of art was very fascinating to me at first because I've always had a slight interest in math and using algorithms to create art work. Here, Jim is using several series of complex organization patterns to unify his work. Unfortunately he uses such complex mathematical systems that I don't find a whole lot of aesthetic significance in most of his works, due to lack of understanding. I'm sure most of these particular works are brilliant and required lots of planning in order to have it all work out logically. But for me, it would take much too long to figure out the whole scheme of things.

I do enjoy the employment of geometric shapes and vibrant colors in Jim Mai's work. Some of his works don't need a mathematical explanation in order to be visually appealing. But others can be rather dull without some sort of explanation that there is a lot more going on in the image than one would suspect. Normally with such minimalistic paintings I would shy away because of how little work was involved, but with Jim Mai's work, there is so much work involved that I can't comprehend it all.