Jan Dickey’s practice approaches painting as a living system shaped by time, light, and material agency. He works with pigments and homemade dyes combined with binders such as egg, oil, casein, animal glue, and acrylic mediums. Chemical and physical processes participate in the formation of each work. Surfaces are built through the prolonged accumulation of varied paint materials and their excavation over months or years, privileging contingency over control.

Compositions begin with fleeting light forms traced from light passing through windows or produced by manipulated reflection in the studio, using convex mirrors affixed with a five-pointed star stencil. The image develops through repeated tracing, masking, and material buildup, arriving after a physically intense, durational process. Dickey thinks of paintings as bodies in space, attentive to scale, edges, and, at times, hinged or connected relationships between canvases.

Underlying his practice is an engagement with painting through ecological thinking. Paint acts as a substance that resists mastery and behaves with a degree of autonomy, allowing form to emerge through material interdependence. The format of painting is a structure for him to consider the limits of human agency and the instability of permanence.