In her second European solo exhibition, Jay Miriam presents Blue Paintings of Women, a new series of paintings at Ornis A. Gallery.

Blue, that poetic double entendre of emotion exists equally in psychology and in physicality. It is both a feeling and color, all in one syllable. Throughout the history of painting this blueness often takes on a somber shape, in Picasso’s Old Guitarist or Monet’s lonely Blue Water Lilies, but it is our projected feelings that make the pigment on canvas represent more. There is serenity in the blue stillness of a lake, a welcome clarity in an azure sky, and a humble humanity in feeling the blues.

With obscured bodies and distorted faces painted in a variety of colors, the portraits in Paintings Of Blue Women exist outside the rules of the title. The figures, painted with oil on linen, live across the spectrum of color. It is not all blue, and similarly, the characters are not all women. The subjects appear genderless in their abstractness, in a state of exploration, reaching out to each other in a quiet excitement that might represent new love or perhaps, that deep blue comfort that comes in a state of loneliness. There is a lingering sexuality in the images and the nude limbs look vaguely recognizable, like waking up in a haze and putting together the pieces with eyes half closed.

The blueness of the images is not a defined sadness or a defined hue, it is the fluidity of color and feeling that are alive in these works. It is clear, Miriam’s abstract portraits do not wallow, instead they take on the same ephemeral status as the color itself. Like that rippling water, clear sky or steady guitar riff, Blue paintings of women is a transition between mind and body and a searching both inward and out.

Jay Miriam (b. 1990) is a Polish – American painter currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Miriam received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, has studied at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Art in Krakow