Swing III 24" x 24"

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Swing III, the third entry in James Nowak’s Swing series from the 2025 New Works Collection, extends the artist’s investigation into rhythm, gesture, and improvisation. While Swing I introduced buoyant spontaneity and Swing II emphasized syncopated precision, Swing III synthesizes these qualities, presenting a composition that is simultaneously playful and measured. The painting affirms Nowak’s ability to treat abstraction as both visual rhythm and musical analogy, crafting variations that echo the phrasing of a jazz suite.

The canvas is marked by a cool blue ground, consistent with the series, onto which Nowak arranges a carefully balanced set of gestures. Thick black arcs dominate, bending like musical phrases across space. They interact with bright yellow sweeps and vivid red ovals, each placed with a sense of timing rather than density.

Unlike the spareness of Swing II, this composition feels more expansive—gestures spread across the field, suggesting a looser, more improvisational cadence. The marks carry a conversational quality, as though instruments were trading lines in call-and-response.

The palette remains pared down yet expressive. Black provides gravity and rhythm, functioning as the bass line. Yellow delivers brightness and lift, echoing brass or percussion. Red injects warmth and intensity, its placement punctuating the canvas with syncopated beats. Against the blue ground, these elements acquire clarity and airiness, allowing each mark to resonate in space.

The overall mood is both lively and balanced: energetic without chaos, structured without rigidity. It captures the “swing” quality—motion that feels inevitable yet playful, where rhythm is carried not only by notes but by pauses.

At its core, Swing III explores variation as continuity. The series as a whole demonstrates that rhythm in abstraction need not rely on density but can emerge through minimal gestures strategically placed. Swing III in particular emphasizes relationality—how marks converse across the canvas, how spacing creates rhythm as much as strokes themselves.

The work embodies the jazz principle of improvisation within form: repetition with difference, variation within a stable framework. Each Swing painting offers a new phrasing, a different cadence, yet all belong to the same compositional suite.

Within the broader New Works Collection, the Swing series serves as a counterpoint to the orchestral density of the Symphony paintings and the organic flourishing of the Delicate Spring works. Where those canvases suggest abundance, Swing III insists on economy. It shows Nowak’s capacity to distill abstraction to its essentials while retaining vitality and depth.

As the third installment, Swing III feels like a culmination: a confident statement that rhythm, color, and gesture can sustain complexity even in minimalist form.

Swing III crystallizes James Nowak’s vision of painting as rhythm, conversation, and improvisation. Through its arcs of black, bursts of red, and sweeps of yellow against a blue ground, the canvas captures the essence of swing—motion suspended between structure and spontaneity. As part of the 2025 New Works Collection, it completes the Swing trilogy as both culmination and continuation, a movement in a suite that affirms Nowak’s unique approach to visual rhythm.