James Chronister, Dreaming of Me (Devonshire House), 2011, oil on canvas 60 x 60 inches.
If you believe patience is a virtue— James Chronister has more than his share. His work began with his collection of pre 1960 dot matrix photographs of landscapes and castles, using a single haired brush to paint one black dot at a time. The scale of his labor was staggering: working ten hours a day, he could cover about two-thirds of an inch on a canvas. This he did for weeks.
Chronister brought this same rigor to reproducing original photographs which were made using the dot matrix system. The precision required was punishing. One misplaced dot could throw off the image, making the image unreadable. As he told KPBS when they interviewed him for his Lux Institute residency, “Half the time, I don’t know what I’m painting. It could be a chair leg obscured in shadow and I don’t know which is the shadow and which is the chair leg.” That uncertainty was just a part of his process.
To maintain fidelity to the source material, he recreated every element with obsessive accuracy: the exact ochre tone of the photographic paper, the precise shade of black, even the scale of the original. Chronister projected the photographs onto his canvas using an opaque projector, which to see the details in the image required total darkness—so complete that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Once the light was gone, he could focus fully, painting for eight to ten hours a day, every day, for six weeks.
James Chronister, Lansdowne, 2013, Oil on Canvas
How did he keep from going mad, leaning over a canvas for weeks to place thousands of individual dots to become interiors and landscapes? For this he had a system. Mornings began with a five-mile run. He rotated between several pairs of shoes, adjusted his chair frequently, and switched between glasses and contacts to keep his eyes sharp. It was a physical discipline as well as a mental one.
The result: hauntingly beautiful paintings that recreate the emotional and formal qualities of their photographic sources—not by mechanical reproduction, but through sheer human effort. What appears mechanical from a distance becomes deeply intimate up close.
Chronister has said, “I understand my use of monochrome as a way of imbuing a realist painting with a level of abstraction. These paintings are just on the verge of abstraction, which begins in their photographic roots.” That tension—between the familiar and the abstract, the camera and the hand— gives Chronister’s work its quiet power.
One striking piece—a grayscale rendering of the drawing room at Lansdowne House—now graces the front of Reesey Shaw Curatorial’s business cards, a quiet tribute to the kind of rigor, intimacy, and layered beauty we value in both art and conversation. RSC carries the spirit of the Enlightenment salon forward—creating spaces where art and ideas are not just displayed, but thoughtfully exchanged.
James Chronister, Lansdowne (detail), 2013, Oil on Canvas
James Chronister, Lansdowne (detail), 2013, Oil on Canvas
James Chronister, Lansdowne (detail), 2013, Oil on Canvas
James Chronister, Lansdowne (detail), 2013, Oil on Canvas
James Chronister
Born: 1978, Helena, Montana Lives and Works: Missoula, Montana Education: Masters of Fine Arts, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Bachelors of Fine Arts, University of Montana, Missoula, MT; University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain Exhibitions (selected): 2022 - Only Sunrises, Eleanor Hardwood Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2010 - Ceremony, Burnet Gallery, Minneapolis, MN; 2007 Listen Like Thieves, Bloom Studios, Oakland, CA Awards, Grants, and Artist Residencies (selected): 2013 - Artist in Residence, Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA; 2010, 2018 - SECA Award, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art