Jamie Nares’s Enduring Romance With the Brushstroke

Jamie Nares (photo Charlie Rubin, courtesy the artist)

This article is part of Hyperallergic’s 2026 Pride Month series, featuring interviews with queer and trans elder artists throughout June.

In sublime canvases animated by choreographies of sweeping motion, Jamie Nares captures the bravura of a brushstroke. The London-born artist has also made experimental films, photography, and music rooted in the spirit of the No Wave movement into which she was thrust when she relocated to New York City in the mid-1970s. In our interview, Nares, who came out as transgender in 2019 and changed her artist name in 2024, leads us through her distinct personal and artistic evolutions, journeys paved by a search for truth. Insistent on finding “the essences of things,” on “stripping away what's superfluous,” Nares articulates a poetics of life and identity.

Jamie Nares, "Can You Hear It" (2010), oil on linen (image courtesy the artist and Olney Gleason)

Hyperallergic: It's great to speak with you. Where are you calling from today?

Jamie Nares: I'm in Upstate New York, in Chatham. I got a house here about three years ago. My kids were saying, “We want a family home. We don't have a family home.” I said, “Okay, I'll get a family home.” I bought this place. And I lucked out because it's beautiful and there's a lot of art activity in the neighborhood. I’ve lived in New York City for 52 years now, 1974 I arrived. And I've decided that I'm going to move Upstate permanently to this house that I bought. I love New York City, the majority of my work has, in some way, been about the city, or much of it has. But I grew up in a completely rural environment. And I'm 72 now, and I just needed to reconnect with where I grew up. New York is so wonderful. It gives you so much. And then there reaches a point where it begins to kind of demand something back, and I feel the demands are just a little too high.

H: Your most iconic works, or the ones that you're best known for, have to do with the brushstroke. It strikes me that this is a fully formed gesture, the kind that comes about after a long process of searching for a mark that is idiosyncratic to an artist. Could you tell me how you got there?

JN: When I first moved to New York, I made films and performances and photographic pieces, and all kinds of stuff. Then I realized that I couldn't do everything and be good at it all, and I also decided that I had to make a living. I was living out on the East End of Long Island, and I had a studio in a potato barn in the middle of a cornfield. I just slowly began to piece together, or to kind of …. It was really a process of reduction, because I reduced the paintings to the thing that interested me most, and that was the brushstroke. I figured that there was enough going on within a single brushstroke, or a single movement of the brush, which may fall into several actual strokes, but always one movement, to keep me interested. And so far I've been proven right.

H: It strikes me as a great exercise of restraint, this idea that a brushstroke could hold your attention in an economy that's always demanding more and more from us.

JN: I find it quite invigorating, and reassuring in a way, too, that I can flesh this one thing out endlessly. You know, there's still a thousand ways I could go with it, and the apparent simplicity of the practice is not the truth of it, really. I liken it to making bread. There are only three or four ingredients, but you can make a different loaf of bread depending on how much salt or flour you use, or whatever else you put in it. I have this formula which I can mix up and make a completely different thing with, and so far I haven't run out of interest in it.

I think I've always been a person who gravitates towards the essences of things. I like essences. Just like my brush strokes, it's a way of stripping away what's superfluous. I stripped away what I figured was not mine, things I had picked up from other people. And what I was left with was this movement. That's something that's central to the films and the paintings, and a lot of the photographs and other things.

Jamie Nares's myriad handmade brushes (image courtesy the artist)

H: Is it also a kind of meditative practice for you, painting? I mean, as a writer, for instance, I find writing actually horrific. I can't say I like it, but I can't stop doing it, and I need to do it.

JN: It's not fun. You know, I remember Frank Stella used to show at Kasmin Gallery, where I also showed, and he did a show there that I thought was great, and really kind of exuberant. I said to him something like, “Oh, I think your show's great. It looks like you really had fun doing it.” And he just turned around and walked away. I realized that that was the difference between generations. Because to me, fun, you know, there's something called “serious fun,” and it's important essentially to enjoy what you're doing, but that said, it is a struggle, and it's not all roses all the way.

H: I know you say you don't make art that has to do with being transgender, but the idea of exploring things until you find what's right and finding the essence of things, it does seem to have a reflection in the finding of one's identity, whatever that may be. Can you talk about what that journey looked like for you?

JN: The journey for me was one that was cloaked in repression and secrecy for most of my life. I grew up in a very restrictive culture: I went to those horrible English boarding schools where they would whip you if you didn't behave and if they didn't like what you were doing. And they really did whip the stuffing out of you if you showed any sort of deviance from the norm. It wasn't good for me, and I kept myself hidden for many, many years. I was always aware of what I then called this side of me. Like it was something to one side. I would occasionally get drunk and babble out to somebody something, which was half understandable. Or I didn't know how to talk about it. I didn't know how to acknowledge it. I didn't know that there was a place for it in the world. I just thought I was a freak. Because I didn't know anybody else who had any sort of gender misidentity or .... I don't know what you call it, gender confusion. At least if they did, they weren't open about it.

In my late teenage years, when I was like 17, 18, I remember buying my first dress, and what a big deal it was for me. I got blind drunk, went into a shop and bought this dress. And I can still see it to this day. The patina of my life, the things that I remember most, had some kind of element of gender confusion. Like, I remember being given the girls' prize at school in the running race when I was five years old. I didn't know it was the girls' prize. I opened it up, and it was this little purse, and I was at the same time thrilled that someone had seen me.

H: What a strong anchor memory that sounds like.

JN: Yeah. I have a few memories like that, that just seem to sum up the struggle. There was this pain in my life, I think is the word, and I didn't know how to deal with it. There was no language. There was nobody to talk to. There were no books. There was nothing, and I began by drowning my sorrows in drugs and drink and everything, which I did a pretty good job of until I quit all that in 1984. But for a few years there, it really saved my life, I think, although it was a slow destruction of its own kind.

H: What did it start to look like, to feel more comfortable, I imagine gradually, embracing some elements of this new identity for you?

JN: Even though I was aware of what was going on in the world and what other people were doing, and I had even been a part of that growth of knowledge and acceptance myself, I had been friends with Nan Goldin, the zeitgeist was very trans and gay-friendly, it was New York, it was the ’70s, it was very free if you chose to be free with it. I wasn't able to do that until later. I was 20 when I came to New York, and the next few years were my sort of coming-of-age, but the culture here was so accepting, unlike anything I'd experienced anywhere before.

Still from Jamie Nares, Rome '78 (1978) (image courtesy the artist)

H: I read a previous interview where you talk about moving to New York as coming home for the first time. Many people talk about being able to find themselves here. You also say it took a while for you ... I'd love to hear more of the more recent years, and when you felt you could embrace your current identity.

JN: I think, after my third failed marriage, I had to have a good look at myself. Each of my wives was aware of this part of me and chose to deal with it in different ways. For years, I had a wardrobe that I kept in boxes that I shoved away in the closet. It was really sad, but that was what I had to do for my own peace of mind. My last wife was very generous, and she made me get everything out of the boxes and hang them in the closet like a real person, that was the beginning of a shift of sorts. She was okay with me expressing myself in the house, but she didn't want me going outside in the neighborhood like that. So that couldn't last, because the cat was more and more out of the bag. After that, it was a kind of process of attrition. Is that the right word? Well, it seems right to me. Attritional. Slowly wearing down the barriers that I had erected from a very early age. And I mean, I had many, many trans friends and gay friends in New York City. We're all just sort of in this thing together. But it was like, that's not for me. I can't do that myself. It's great for you if you want to do it, but I can't show that.

I had a retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum [in 2019], and at the same time, I had a show opening here in New York, and I just decided, ‘To hell with it, I'm going to announce myself at the opening of my show. I have three daughters and a stepson, and they always knew about this side of me and had always been very supportive. I had told my middle daughter that I'd taken some photographs of myself at some point, and she said, “Oh, Papa, these are so good. Could I put one on my Instagram?” I said, “Yeah, sure,” forgetting for a moment the power of social media. The next thing I knew, people were calling me out of the blue from my past, like, “What's this I hear?” And so it was kind of great. I didn't have to go around telling people. It was all done for me.

H: It's what we call a soft launch.

JN: It really was. I didn't have to do anything, and everyone else told each other. And my kids have been my biggest supporters. They're wonderful.

Jamie Nares, "Split Flap" (2012), oil on linen (image courtesy the artist and Olney Gleason)

H: With the current threats to healthcare for trans people and non-binary people in the United States, but also even the denial of their very existence, I think of all those who might not go on that journey of embracing who they really are. Do you ever think about Europe as a place where the community, the culture, is more welcoming?

JN: It's awful. Just when you thought we were getting somewhere, these terrible people just try and shove the lid back on. But you know, I really feel that it's too late. The lid is off. People have taken this into their own hands, and there may be all kinds of things that are slung at us and ways that they try to shut us up and get rid of us, but we're pretty resilient and pretty darn strong. Because when you've grown up denied, it can build a strength inside you, which I think a lot of people have.

It's funny because when I came here, the culture in Europe was much less forgiving than it was here. But now the culture [in the US] as a whole is unbelievably ugly and unkind .... I'm aware of what's going on in other parts of the country, it doesn't really affect me personally, and I think I'm quite a privileged trans person. I do feel that I think I should be doing more, but there you go.

H: Well, that's very candid, but I think it also gets exhausting to feel like you have to carry a banner for everything when you're just trying to exist, right?

JN: Yes. And I guess I do feel that I carry my own little banner wherever I go. Because I am who I am. I'm out in the world. I show up as myself. I stand up for myself, and if anything, that's, in a way, that's the best we can do. Or at least without that, there's nothing else.

H: Is there anything right now that you're working on that you want to share?

JN: Well, you know, it's funny. I'm now 72 and I've never been so full of ideas in my life. I've always had a million ideas happening at the same time, but they're coming fast and furious at me. Right now I have a couple of films I'm working on, some of my earlier films have been feature-length or close to it, but recently I've been making these short films. I must say that my film Rome ’78 was about as close as I got to revealing myself through my film work in the old days. It was a film made in 1978 in New York with everybody in Roman costume. David McDermott played the kind of demented Caesar character, and he's genius.

I also have some new paintings, which are interesting because the gesture is more contained inside a more painterly brushwork. Not an isolated brush stroke, but a very simple, basic brushwork. This is something I haven't done before, at least not with a view to showing them.

I was very happy when I finally got that retrospective I told you about and walked around for the first time and realized that all these disparate things fit together. They all bounced off each other, and they made sense. That I hadn't been just completely flying from one thing to the next. There was a thread, and that was very reassuring and exciting for me to see. So I quite often take it back to something I did a long time ago, and I pick it up where I left off then.