James T. Dormer’s recent donation to the AP/RC indicates his unmistakable commitment to the potentials of abstract expressionism. Trained first as a painter (MFA in 1964, Pennsylvania State University), and then as a printmaker (MA in 1969, University of Iowa), Dormer uses lithography and intaglio to create visual rejoinders to flowering plum trees, Wallace Stevens’ poetry, and the smog and heat of Los Angeles.

Make a mark, follow it with another mark. Let one moment guide to the next. Since the late 1940s, the compelling combination of abstraction and expressionism has generated a way of making art that remembers or records a movement of an arm, a turn of a hand, a splatter from a brush, a drip from a bucket, an automatic reflex. A fleeting thought, a passing gesture, a moment of anger or joy, a short-lived response made permanent, all arrested in a lineage of a fluid process. Dormer’s works are the improvisational jazz of printmaking.

Dormer lives in Fort Collins, CO and teaches at Colorado State University. All of the works reproduced are lithographs.

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