As an artist, I view the process of artistic creation as having a spiritual significance to it, for out of nothing rebirth and renewal happens. And with paint, brush and canvas an artist creates an image that manifests what was a figment of his mind. 

At age seventy I started a new spiritual journey, after graduating from art school late in life, venturing to explore my life anew. A form of rebirth. During this period, I traveled down various paths to finally connect with themes of: structural and psychological barriers, violence and war, and, freedom and open expansion.

In any adventure, accidents sometime take you in unforeseen directions. One such accident gave birth to the series of shaped canvases, the birth of form by manipulating the canvas. Rather than using paint to create space on a flat canvas, through an accident, I chanced upon using the canvas to create form and space. 

As form, texture, and color violently collided, the shaped canvas then became the vessel for my expressions of barriers, violence, freedom and expansion.

— James Paradis 2021

James Paradis, 88, graduated from the Mass College of Art with a BFA after having begun his studies at the college in his late sixties. His first major solo show in 2003 was at the French Library and Cultural Center of Boston. He has shown at the Copley Society of Boston, Granite Shore Gallery, the Court Yard Gallery, Flatrocks Gallery, Gloucester. He has exhibited in Auvillar, France where he was invited as a guest artist of the Centre d’Exchange Cultural d’Auvillar in 2002 and 2003. In 2005 he was in a two man show at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. This is his first solo show at Jane Deering Gallery.