James Ormiston

James Ormiston

James Ormiston is a Kiwi-born artist who made the move to Barcelona in early 2022. He grew up on a farm in rural New Zealand before relocating to Dunedin in his late teens to pursue a career in the arts. He studied Fine Art for a time at the Dunedin School of Art but left when opportunities arose to open an art gallery and focus on his illustration work. The latter would ultimately earn him a spot in an Australian Art Residency Program in 2017, prompting a move to Melbourne. The residency program gave James the opportunity to transition from illustration to Fine Art, enabling him to study under a variety of contemporary realist painters and hone his skills.

Seeing creation as a practice rather than a performance has been an invaluable shift in mindset, to which he credits his recent artistic output. His practice has largely taken the form of experimental portraiture within the genre of “disrupted realism.” His current body of work, Pushing Through the Skin, explores themes of identity, multiplicity, and the concept of self. The work in this series seeks to distance portraiture from faithful representation by distorting the subjects into near-anonymity through abstraction, omission, and the push and pull of order and chaos. Veins of bright colors piercing through carefully rendered realism are a recurring motif in the series—a nod to the dance of contradictions that co-exist within all of us.

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Permanent artist in Artevistas Gallery