Jim Ewing
-Born: 1988 in New Jersey, USA
A painter and sculptor based in Southern California who works from his studio in Cathedral City, California. A self-directed artist, he developed his studio practice through independent study after more than fifteen years working across photography, cinematography, film, television, and post-production. His professional work has contributed to projects for CBS, Disney, DreamWorks, Paramount Pictures, MTV, BET, Viacom, and Sports Illustrated.
Ewing’s work has been exhibited in group shows at Untitled Gallery in Ontario, Flat Black in Palm Desert, and Sammy Zelcer Fine Art in Cathedral City. His practice examines pressure, containment, rupture, and transformation through distorted figures, biomorphic forms, painting, and sculpture. His current series, Torn, focuses on surfaces that split, stretch, peel, and open under force.
Artist Statement
My work examines pressure, containment, and what remains when something is forced to change. Through oil painting and sculptural works, I create bodies and surfaces that stretch, distort, split, peel, and tear apart. Whether the form is figurative, biomorphic, or almost entirely abstract, it often appears caught in the middle of becoming something else.
I’m interested in the moment just before or after containment fails. Rather than depicting movement as a completed action, I attempt to hold its evidence in place. A body bends without settling into a stable form.
My earlier paintings approached these ideas through distorted figures and fleshlike forms. Bodies melted, folded inward, opened, and reorganized themselves into unfamiliar structures. Over time, the figure began to recede and the surface itself became the body. What was once represented through painted anatomy is now increasingly built into the physical structure of the work through tension, depth, rupture, and exposed material.
Using canvas, plaster, fabric, paint, and construction materials, I create works that move between image and object. I often contrast controlled exterior fields with rougher or more visceral interiors, allowing changes in texture, depth, and color to suggest that the visible surface is only one layer of the work. Red frequently emerges from darker greens, blacks, whites, and muted fields. It functions as an interior presence and as a recurring thread connecting different stages of my practice.
The openings and distortions in my work are not intended to represent one specific wound, event, or emotion. A rupture can be destructive, but it can also create the first opportunity for something concealed to become visible.
My practice is ultimately concerned with the ways people and materials respond to force. We stretch, resist, split, adapt, and repair ourselves. The evidence of those changes is not separate from what we become. In the end, we are each our own patchwork.