Alfred Jarry

Thomas Chimes is an artist who uses images as symbols for ideas.  This finely painted portrait is based on a photograph of the highly eccentric French dramatist, poet, and humorous Alfred Jarry, whose short career spanned the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth.  Jarry's delicate, hallucinatory presence, barely visible, floats in a luminous white dreamspace.

For Chimes, the pearly surface symbolizes an emerging consciousness.  The artist invites us to meditate on the image of Jarry, who was a mysterious yet key figure in the development of modern arts and letters, influencing such notables as James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp.