Jim Yale’s multi-disciplinary visual work is a meditation on the random combinations of color, message, language, and form found in everyday life.

Yale’s painting and drawing work pulls inspiration from Matisse, Cézanne, Die Brücke, and the figurative art of the Bay Area in the 1950s and 60s. Figures are often alone, sometimes in an undefined space. Gesture takes precedence over realism. Figures are sometimes merely assemblages of flat planes of color.

Yale’s influences in collage include Dadaists like Kurt Schwitters, abstract expressionists like Robert Motherwell, pop art, and Joseph Cornell’s assemblages. Each piece is an exercise in gestalt theory, embracing principles of closure, proximity, figure/ground, continuation, similarity, symmetry, and order. 

Using found paper materials and industrial production techniques, he incorporates and manipulates found objects, ephemera, and packaging material, crafting unique, layered narratives.