Untitled (Feyfully Yours)

Couples gazing confrontationally at each other, or struggling amorously, in enigmatic and erotically-charged dramas populate Jim Nutt’s oeuvre. In this context, the homophonic alternate title (Feyfully/Faithfully Yours) conjures ironic associations with otherworldly couples unlucky in love, like Apollo and Daphne in ancient Greek mythology. In the 1970s and 1980s Nutt produced similarly intricate color pencil drawings featuring such couples, sometimes presented in an equally intricate acrylic-painted frame. Cutting the mat board in order to follow the ragged edges of the paper speaks further to his focus on craftsmanship and the frame’s role in articulating an image or image group. (See Smart Museum 2001.648-649, 2001.650-651 and 2007.169.)
Nutt’s interest in the print techniques of 17th century Masters extended to their painting techniques, like scumbling, a distant forebear of Pointillism, the 19th century method for mixing colors optically by juxtaposing dots or patches of pure color. He achieved the aesthetic effect of this drawing by means of painstakingly small applications of different pigments laid down in close proximity to each other, a time consuming process of building the image in layers with transparent colors to create a luminous and jewel-like surface. The theatrical aspect also recalls the pointillist spectacles of modern life that were a favored subject of the Neo-Impressionist innovator Georges Seurat (1859‒1891).