Licha Jimenez is a Mexican-born abstract painter who grew up in Mexico, Austin, Texas and Los Angeles, California. After thirty years in New York, she returned in 2020 to central Texas.
Jimenez’s abstract style is vital, organic, evocative and challenging. Her carefully controlled and balanced paintings are layered and latticed with mysterious structures and suggestive volumes. In a painterly echo of the style she developed over many years as a successful fine-art jeweler, Jimenez work is always energetic but also finely controlled. Her intricate spaces may pulse, swirl, sizzle or seep with energy and life, but not in any loose, wild, random or disconnected way. Everything has been carefully thought out, or has evolved precisely over time. Often the visual space is suggestive of some kind of biological or natural matrix or framework. Viewers sometimes describe the work as having a visceral or vegetal quality – “like the inside of a body” or “like the inside of fruit.” Other analogies are to natural phenomena – branching, confluences, blood vessels, tributaries, leaf patterns, nebulae, crystals, vortices, lightning.
Jimenez consciously looks for ways to involve the viewer’s participation in the esthetic act. One technique for eliciting this participation comes in the use of scale, with finely detailed local portions of the canvas competing for attention with the larger composition, so that the viewers needs to make her own decisions. The viewer must choose where to engage with these surprising, multi-chambered, confounding spaces. Another technique Jimenez employs to invite the viewer’s co-creation of the esthetic act involves the use of evocative abstraction. In this technique, volumes, spaces, outlines are suggestive of figurative origins. Where one viewer may guess at a particular representative figure, another viewer will see something different. One viewer begins by looking at the whole canvas while another viewer begins by approaching a small, highly-detailed area. The esthetic experience is a collaboration between artist and viewer.
Jimenez’s paintings tend to be quite complex so that they resist being taken in at a glance. This complexity is organic in that it issues from Jimenez’s methodical process, which is very highly layered. Jimenez likes to begin work from a central concept, which she conceives of as similar to the poet’s theme. “It has to be about something,” she says. Sometimes she will begin with a bit of text – a motto, quotation or story – which she will write or paint on the canvas. This starting point helps her focus and sometime provides a type of encouragement. When she did a painting called She-Wolf (2017), her starting concept was a mother’s fierce protectiveness, so she began with a violent scribbling phase. In Beowulf (2020), Jimenez wished to explore the legend of a heroic figure that overcomes fatigue (inspired by humanity’s resistance to covid-19). Here, the initial phase of the painting involved depiction of stylized iconography of the Beowulf legend (helmet, shield, sword, and so forth).
Once the painting is under way, however, Jimenez’s focus switches over to an exploration of the opportunities provided by the initial space. Her characteristic method is layering. As she works, layers accrete almost like geological strata, earlier layers are partially or entirely obscured. As the painting progresses, Jimenez’s focus becomes purely formal, a dance which involves creating visual complexity and then resolving it or balancing it. Jimenez rotates the canvas as she works so that she explores the visual space from all perspectives. When a painting reaches completion she says she can feel it as an approaching sense of peace or relaxation.
After studies at the University of Texas, Jimenez moved to New York City in the early 1980s to begin an artistic career that included phases as a painter, fine art jeweler and art gallery owner (she founded one of the pioneer galleries in the Williamsburg art revival. The gallery, which she ran with Mitchell Algus, gave her the opportunity to expand her circles, meeting and working with many artists living there in the late 80s and through 1998 when she moved to the Hudson Valley.
Jimenez developed her early painting style in the 1980s and 1990s. She was a devotee of the New York art scene and was impressed (though not necessarily influenced by) the great “painterly painters” who were showing at the time, such as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel. Jimenez sometimes says she is a self-taught artist but adds that she wasn’t self-taught in isolation, she was self-taught in New York city where she was inspired by everyone from the great masters in the Met to the modern masters from De Kooning to Basquiat. She detects a kind of esthetic kinship to her style in the work of Arshile Gorky, De Kooning and others, but she feels that she has been just as inspired by artists with dramatically different styles, painters like Francisco Toledo, Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo.
Jimenez’s abstract style is vital, organic, evocative and challenging. Her carefully controlled and balanced paintings are layered and latticed with mysterious structures and suggestive volumes. In a painterly echo of the style she developed over many years as a successful fine-art jeweler, Jimenez work is always energetic but also finely controlled. Her intricate spaces may pulse, swirl, sizzle or seep with energy and life, but not in any loose, wild, random or disconnected way. Everything has been carefully thought out, or has evolved precisely over time. Often the visual space is suggestive of some kind of biological or natural matrix or framework. Viewers sometimes describe the work as having a visceral or vegetal quality – “like the inside of a body” or “like the inside of fruit.” Other analogies are to natural phenomena – branching, confluences, blood vessels, tributaries, leaf patterns, nebulae, crystals, vortices, lightning.
Jimenez consciously looks for ways to involve the viewer’s participation in the esthetic act. One technique for eliciting this participation comes in the use of scale, with finely detailed local portions of the canvas competing for attention with the larger composition, so that the viewers needs to make her own decisions. The viewer must choose where to engage with these surprising, multi-chambered, confounding spaces. Another technique Jimenez employs to invite the viewer’s co-creation of the esthetic act involves the use of evocative abstraction. In this technique, volumes, spaces, outlines are suggestive of figurative origins. Where one viewer may guess at a particular representative figure, another viewer will see something different. One viewer begins by looking at the whole canvas while another viewer begins by approaching a small, highly-detailed area. The esthetic experience is a collaboration between artist and viewer.
Jimenez’s paintings tend to be quite complex so that they resist being taken in at a glance. This complexity is organic in that it issues from Jimenez’s methodical process, which is very highly layered. Jimenez likes to begin work from a central concept, which she conceives of as similar to the poet’s theme. “It has to be about something,” she says. Sometimes she will begin with a bit of text – a motto, quotation or story – which she will write or paint on the canvas. This starting point helps her focus and sometime provides a type of encouragement. When she did a painting called She-Wolf (2017), her starting concept was a mother’s fierce protectiveness, so she began with a violent scribbling phase. In Beowulf (2020), Jimenez wished to explore the legend of a heroic figure that overcomes fatigue (inspired by humanity’s resistance to covid-19). Here, the initial phase of the painting involved depiction of stylized iconography of the Beowulf legend (helmet, shield, sword, and so forth).
Once the painting is under way, however, Jimenez’s focus switches over to an exploration of the opportunities provided by the initial space. Her characteristic method is layering. As she works, layers accrete almost like geological strata, earlier layers are partially or entirely obscured. As the painting progresses, Jimenez’s focus becomes purely formal, a dance which involves creating visual complexity and then resolving it or balancing it. Jimenez rotates the canvas as she works so that she explores the visual space from all perspectives. When a painting reaches completion she says she can feel it as an approaching sense of peace or relaxation.
After studies at the University of Texas, Jimenez moved to New York City in the early 1980s to begin an artistic career that included phases as a painter, fine art jeweler and art gallery owner (she founded one of the pioneer galleries in the Williamsburg art revival. The gallery, which she ran with Mitchell Algus, gave her the opportunity to expand her circles, meeting and working with many artists living there in the late 80s and through 1998 when she moved to the Hudson Valley.
Jimenez developed her early painting style in the 1980s and 1990s. She was a devotee of the New York art scene and was impressed (though not necessarily influenced by) the great “painterly painters” who were showing at the time, such as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel. Jimenez sometimes says she is a self-taught artist but adds that she wasn’t self-taught in isolation, she was self-taught in New York city where she was inspired by everyone from the great masters in the Met to the modern masters from De Kooning to Basquiat. She detects a kind of esthetic kinship to her style in the work of Arshile Gorky, De Kooning and others, but she feels that she has been just as inspired by artists with dramatically different styles, painters like Francisco Toledo, Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo.