Fly Away 36" x 36"

See more art from the 2025 New Works

James Nowak’s Fly Away, part of his 2025 New Works Collection, embodies a distinct shift from structural tension toward a visual language of release and movement. Where Tension explored the clash between geometry and gesture, Fly Away relinquishes containment altogether, embracing an energetic openness that resonates with the work’s evocative title. The canvas becomes a space of flight, scattering painterly marks across its surface in a rhythm that feels at once chaotic and lyrical.

The composition is a flurry of dynamic brushstrokes in green, yellow, blue, and crimson, dispersed with little regard for a central anchor. Unlike the gridlike underpinnings of Tension, here the marks float in loose constellations, evoking flocks in motion or leaves caught in the wind. Each gesture curves and arcs with directional force, suggesting upward and outward propulsion.

The absence of rectilinear anchors amplifies a sense of weightlessness. What remains is a field of energetic encounters, each brushstroke interacting with the others in a dance that refuses hierarchy. This compositional openness aligns with the work’s theme of liberation, as if the paint itself is taking flight from the surface.

Nowak deploys a high-key palette that emphasizes vitality. The dominant greens and yellows exude a freshness suggestive of spring and growth, while the cobalt blues ground the composition in coolness and depth. The interjections of red-brown strokes provide contrast, hinting at turbulence amid otherwise buoyant tones. The overall atmosphere is one of restless optimism—light yet insistent, like wings beating against air currents.

At its core, Fly Away explores freedom through dispersion. The strokes do not conform to order, nor do they coalesce into a singular image. Instead, they fragment, scatter, and diverge, embodying the act of leaving behind boundaries. The title frames the painting as a metaphor for release—from constraint, from gravity, perhaps from the strictures of formalism itself.

There is also a subtle dialogue with art history: the gestural field recalls Abstract Expressionism, yet Nowak recontextualizes it in the 21st century by emphasizing lightness over gravity, flight over existential weight. Rather than heroic struggle, Fly Away leans toward celebration and transcendence.

In the arc of the New Works Collection, Fly Away reads as a counterpoint to Tension. Where the latter insists on friction and containment, this painting dissolves into openness. It demonstrates Nowak’s ongoing exploration of dualities—not by resolving them but by staging their contrast across works. In this sense, Fly Away does not abandon structure so much as it imagines what happens when structure is let go.

Fly Away is a study in dispersion, lightness, and the exhilaration of release. Through its restless brushwork and buoyant color palette, James Nowak constructs a vision of abstraction untethered, alive with the sensation of movement and possibility. It reminds the viewer that in letting go, one may not fall but instead find flight.