the New Pantagruel

The Way Is Through, Not Around

by John Paul Davis:: a conversation withJim Janknegt

everal articles in this issue of The New Pantagruel feature paintings by Jim Jankegt, a Texas-based artist whose body of work struck us as coming as close as one can get to our ideal of “joyfully engag[ing] in earthly reality, insisting on seeing both the divine reflection and the demonic shadow.” Art and Design Editor John Paul Davis conversed with Jim over email during the last few weeks of April.

The New Pantagruel:

Looking at your entire body of work, one thing I noticed that struck me was that your early paintings, the stuff done in the 80s, is almost entirely urban-themed, with darker, cooler colors, and morose or stoic subjects. Almost all the scenes are night scenes; all the light is artificial. Then a period begins in the early 90s in which your subject matter becomes more explicitly religious: scenes from biblical stories, or domestic scenes that remind me of Chagall’s domestic scenes–the subject matter is mundane, but the painting itself is more ecstatic. Your most recent work seems to move into the suburbs altogether and sometimes into the country. The colors get brighter, the subjects are happier, and the style becomes somewhat geometric and cubist. But not cubist in the sense of trying to get all three dimensions on the canvas so much as perhaps an attempt to get at a fourth (spiritual) dimension on the canvas. Can you talk about this development?

Jim Jankegt:

What you have observed in the stylistic progression of my work is the biography of my life. While in graduate school at the University of Iowa I was challenged by Mauricio Lasansky, the head of the printmaking department, to no longer work from my head but to work from my gut. I began working from memory drawing scenes from my adolescence. My marriage of 5 years had disintegrated, and upon moving back to Austin in 1982, I began to use the night-time cityscapes as a metaphor for my emotional and spiritual state, as well as, from my perception, the state of the world. I felt, as Walker Percy stated, that I was being a diagnostician of the modern condition. I would take my camp stool, wander around town at night, sit on street corners, sketch, then return to my studio and work up the paintings. The drawing was very naturalistic, but the colors were lurid and vibrant as I focused on the neon and street lights.


In 1985 I was asked to participate in an invitational show called “Contemporary Altarpieces.” I painted the painting Crucifixion at Barton Creek Mall for this exhibit. (Editor’s note: the painting is featured here.) It is a traditional crucifixion, except the setting is in the parking lot of a new mall in Austin with the city skyline in the background. The people who are acting out the responses of the crowds as described in the gospels are all wearing contemporary clothes. There are several neon signs on the lamp post on which Jesus is hanging: open 24 hours, no vacancy, and eat here. (As an aside: The exhibit was to be in the lobby of a big bank in downtown Austin, but when the president of the bank saw my painting he immediately called the curator of the show and demanded that my painting be removed because he, being a Baptist, found the work to be sacreligious. Rather than take my painting down, the curator removed the entire show before it even opened. The event made the front page of the Austin paper, including a photo of my painting. Folks who had never seen the painting were calling the local Christian radio station decrying this blasphemous painting.) This painting was very much like the cityscapes I had been doing but included an overt religious subject. I decided that if I had something of a spiritual nature to say, why not just say it? So I started doing more overt Christian subject matter but in the same style and set in contemporary Austin.

tNP:

Are the signs intended to be referential to the modern church? When I first saw that painting, the “eat here” bit seemed a reference to the Eucharist, and “no vacancy” recalled the nativity story in Matthew, but it also was suggestive to me of “mall churches,” as was “open 24 hours.” There’s an irony there: these huge churches that have taken the architecture and attitude of the shopping mall, but which have no vacancy. And the people in the painting sort of reinforced that notion for me, people hurrying past the disturbing spectacle of the crucifixion to their shopping.