Jacob Littlejohn

And what if the mind were a well, deep but still with a firm base, though not a material limit? There would be water there, real water, dark, oily, at turns slimy, that once in a while rebels, overflows; and isn’t that cataclysmic event what we name “sea?”
—Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog, 2012

Karma presents Fata Morgana, Scottish painter Jacob Littlejohn’s debut Los Angeles exhibition, open from November 9 to December 21, 2024, at 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard. 

Jacob Littlejohn’s paintings contend with the natural phenomena and myths that structure our relationship to the cosmos. Working with landscape not as a genre but as a conceptual framework, he decenters the individual to focus instead on the earth and the narratives we invent to understand its magnitude. Fata Morgana, named for a mirage that sometimes appears above the horizon between sea and sky, features abstract oil paintings made in the past year. Tricks of perception are implicit in this title, which refers not only to this visual phantasm but also to Morgan le Fay, a fairy character with shapeshifting powers whose origins lie in Arthurian myth. Inspired by her metamorphoses, Scottish maritime folktales, and scientific imagery, Littlejohn’s gestural paintings are ecocentric odes to the sublime. 

Here, paintings the size of a sheet of journal paper share space with others that measure more than seven feet tall. Littlejohn’s oscillation between monumental and intimate scales comes from his interest in both the macrocosmic and microcosmic elements of nature: every mighty storm is composed of individual drops of water, and every towering mountain is a mass of discrete particles of soil and stone. The eight-foot-wide Time is My Country, Fog is My Land (all works 2024), a flurry of sap-green, yellow, and red daubs, evokes a forest seen from the distance, quivering in the wind. Flashes of yellow illuminate the swirling, dark field that forms the ground of Soft Horizons, Quiet Tongues, which crackles like an immense solar radiation storm. The allover composition of Breatheee, structured by lateral bands of periwinkle, seems to map a more intimate phenomenon, like vibrations in the air lingering after a long exhale. Littlejohn’s gestures do not add up to concrete representations but rather evoke, through abstraction that implies movement, nature experienced on the edge of perception. In the artist’s words, this shapeshifting body of work, like a mirage, “simultaneously constructs and deconstructs an image.”

Littlejohn’s process is both accretive and responsive: while his references here include diagrams like flood maps and wave interference patterns, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), and literary sources like Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (1961), Scottish folktales, and the poetry of Etel Adnan, he nonetheless approaches each canvas open to its possibilities, guided by his palette and open to the chance interaction of colors. Gravity, which he describes as a “way of creating history,” is a constitutive factor in his paintings: rivulets of paint reveal the passage of time. Hielanman’s Umbrella, the rare painting titled after a man-made architectural feature—in this case, a glass-walled railway bridge in the center of Glasgow—is stained with vertical drips that bring to mind rain against a windowpane. The palette here is in part inspired by Scotland, where Littlejohn has spent most of his life, and in part by the turn-of-the-century Tonalist landscapes of American painters like James McNeill Whistler and George Inness. Like the Tonalists, Littlejohn makes paintings that are attuned to the subtle differences in light and color that shift over the course of a day, and also works in a landscape tradition concerned with the thresholds between the visible and the imperceptible. 

A culture’s artistic representations of nature, whether through painting, poetry, or literature, reveal how the people of a given time conceive of their relationship to their environment. By returning to foregone ways of seeing the landscape as an uncontrollable force while at the same time pushing forward into abstraction, Littlejohn proposes a reconfiguration of our contemporary relationship to the wilderness: a new sensitivity to its supernatural valence that sets the human aside to focus instead on forces larger than ourselves, an ecological ontology.