Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Willie Jinks
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Bloomington, IL: Cometogetherspace
63%
Untitled. late 20th-early 21st century. Oil on board
This is a comparatively good piece by Jinks, who tended (he was self-taught) towards totemic single-subject compositions that can feel somewhat decorative and undeveloped. Undeveloped because his figures usually exist on monochrome backgrounds that don't, even vaguely, suggest real space. Occasionally, Jinks painted more complex scenes, which like his simpler paintings fail to articulate depth and body but which are usually much better at getting away with it. This is because, in the busier pictures, there's a tension between the spatial relations which the architectural forms imply and the actual absence of dimensional space. In this piece, the way the white ground shows through as sky, skin, and the building's facade is impossible to square with the diegetic fact that some of these things have to be in front of each other, some behind. This is a minor merit and a common one among outsider artists, but it's still worth mentioning (even if it's not enough to salvage the painting's failure to relieve the tension it's rather good at building up). (TFS, 2025)