9/2009
Painting Teacher Exhibits Work At Tunxis Gallery
Author: JENNIFER ABEL
Staff writer, New Britain Herald
FARMINGTON - There’s no mistaking Gary Jacobs for anything but a painter; the day he stood in the Barnes-Franklin art gallery on the campus of Tunxis Community College, just after teaching a painting class, he wore paint-spattered blue jeans and a T-shirt apparently from the exotic Canadian province of “a Scotia”; the “Nov” was permanently hidden beneath countless layers of paint.
Jacobs has taught painting at Tunxis since January, but his current art exhibit, on display at the Barnes-Franklin gallery through Sept. 30, was first proposed last September.
“I’ve had shows in most places in the area. This is my most gratifying show. I’m very happy with the way it looks, and the fact that the school made it available,” he said.
The gallery is brightly lit, with blond-wood floors and white walls which provide a perfect background for Jacobs’ oil paintings, most of which favor colors brighter and bolder than any found in nature. Some of his works are photo-realistic, some purely abstract and some a combination of the two.
“My favorite painting is always my most recent one,” he said, and in this exhibition that spot is held by the abstract piece “Grey Painting #2”, which, despite the title, doesn’t have much gray in it.
“This is pure abstract, focusing on formal elements like color and composition,” he said. However, Jacobs said, the painting which most people most closely associate with him is “Jacob on the Mountain,” which shows a stylized image of a man’s outline in classic meditative yoga pose against a brightly colored forest scene.
“He’s kind of my alter ego, contemplating nature,” Jacobs said. “He contains all of the emotions I have, but I step back from him to view the artistic process.”
Jacobs is originally from West Hartford and now lives in Hartford. He studied painting at the Hartford Art School, and got his Master’s in painting at Brooklyn College. Before coming to Tunxis, he taught at Hartford Art School, the University of Hartford, and the Corcoran School in Washington, D.C. He also spent 15 years in the commercial world, working in product development and graphic design, before returning to teaching. Of course, he spent the entire time working on his own paintings as well.
The Gary Jacobs art exhibit can be seen at the Barnes-Franklin gallery on the Tunxis campus through Sept. 30. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. through 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Many of the pieces in the exhibit, and other examples of Jacobs’ work, can be seen online at Garyjacobsart.com. |
 Jennifer Dauphinais, lucid magazine, 9/30/2004
gary jacobs
Hartford painter Gary Jacobs does spiritual art. Straight up God vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, Joseph Campbell type stuff. His work is not aesthetic, or demonstrative or hip. It isn’t created exclusively for art types to understand. It’s made for everyone. The minute I laid eyes on his work I understood it. The images triggered feelings I don’t often see exposed in our day to day lives, yet they consume my daily thinking. How do we see ourselves in the big picture? Who is God? Why are we alive?
his work
Jacobs’ paintings act as a sounding board to resolve some of the answers. They document energy and convey ethereal themes through graphic dabs and slashes bursting with pigment. Jacobs uses a vibrant palette of oil paint on untreated linen and canvas. The figures are stylized and at times abstracted illuminating euphoric and treacherous physical states. His paintings are what he describes as an overlap of the biological and cosmological worlds; things not seen to the naked eye but understood in primal ways.
“I started painting in my mid 20s and it felt great. I immediately felt a sense of ability and power, even though it would take years to develop that. I also felt that I was tapping into a great and challenging tradition. Painting has been seen as one of the most powerful transforming agents in history and I saw it as one of the only ways to study and address big, universal ideas.” Jacobs says.
The Faithful (featured on our cover, and shown in it’s entirety at right) is my favorite piece by Jacobs. The painting isn’t religious, it speaks more about freedom or lack thereof. Though it was painted around a friend’s personal struggle, to me The Faithful sums up what the world is in dire need of today— inspiration, faith and enlightenment. It’s a refreshing break from the blood and guts of CNN and far more effective.
“If there is anything good in this world we have to find it and bring it into our lives. Painting itself is an act of creation and if we lose it we lose any ability to sustain ourselves in our lives, our thoughts, our hopes and our dreams.” Jacobs says.
his thoughts
“I think the CT art scene is a microcosm of the art-world as a whole, which is to say that the most fascinating thing is the tremendous energy happening at the grassroots level.” Gary Jacobs explains in an email to me last week. “The advent of the digital age has brought incredible possibilities to individuals that the gallery scene has not been able to do. I think young artists today take more responsibility for their artistic statements, their careers and goals. Many of them have higher aspirations than I've tended to see before, simply because they know they can get their message out there in practically any form they want. In the end, some kind of arbiter will have to sort all this out and determine what trends, styles and directions define our times, but in the meantime, I think art is reconnecting with and becoming more meaningful to a greater audience all the time.”
Jacobs is right. In a sped up world the old fashioned trip to the museum isn’t always operative. His web site, www.garyjacobsart.com, is one of the best examples I’ve seen of a virtual gallery and media vehicle by a visual artist. And with work as effective and necessary as Jacob’s, it’s important to get the word out to as many people as possible.
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"Gary Jacobs' rich, colorful paintings emerge from the artist's own construction of a [spiritual] myth, inspired in turn by the writing of Joseph Campbell. A fusion of image and word, Jacobs' stunning palette examines the relationship between the visual and the literal, the cultural and the mythological." Real Art Ways - Oct. 2000 |
September, 1994
By Patricia Rosoff
Pictures at an Exhibition
The double lives of Gary Jacobs’ paintings
Gary Jacobs: A Journey to Geometrics, Ellen Traut Collection, Farmington Avenue, Hartford, Through Sept. 4 |
Gary Jacobs’ paintings are not what they immediately would seem. The range of the work, which spans a number of years, follows a dual progression- toward visual simplification on the one hand, toward narrative complication on the other. An overview at an early point in a young career, this exhibit suggests an interpretive turning point for the artist. While all these pictures fall within the category of still life, the most recent paintings verge upon surrealistic concerns in contrast to earlier, more directly aesthetic ones. Executed in a spare, coolly objective style, this exhibit demonstrates a consistent directive control that goes beyond simple “realism,” one that evokes a generally haunting, sometimes chilling, undertone.
Such reverberations are not evinced in all of the pictures. The earliest works are larger and visually more straightforward, complex, and coloristically varied. For instance, “684”, one of the largest works in the exhibit, exemplifies Jacob’s masterful knack for the distribution of formal elements. Graphically, this is a handsome, polished composition. Subject-wise, its carefully aesthetic arrangement of garage detria (old tires and sweatpants, a large wooden industrial spool, an inverted hammer) contains a few subtle inclusions- a precariously-tipping enamelware bowl, a solitary green apple.
More overtly disturbing is the imagery in “Mom,” a complex work replete with painful elements. In the left background a coconut is spiked with steel nails, from one of which dangles a glistening nail scissor, beaked jaws open, each of the two rings of its grippers like the loop of a child’s bubble pipe. At the upper right, Balthus-like, a large round of crusty bread, stabbed with a wood-handled knife, presents a long gash to our uiew. Traditional symbols from 15th century nativity scenes are distributed in the foreground- lace-edged white linen, and empty china cup, a saucer with three eggs (two whole, one spilled out, shining, on the plate). This work bristles with threatening animus.
Flags dominate the second group of paintings in the chronology, and serve as an abstracting catalyst in Jacobs’ compositional arrangements. Stretched flatly across the background, these geometrically-divided, satiny surfaces are treated as a kind of graphic “map” against which foreground elements are placed. The rhythmic interactions between this natural grid and certain carefully profiled foreground objects (a rose, a maple leaf) serve as a foil for Jacobs’ increased concentration on pictorial meaning.
“State,” the richest of this group, introduces the format as well as the “platonic” geometric forms (cube, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, etc.) that are central to the most recent work of the exhibit. In this small painting, pictorial balance is achieved by meticulous variations on symmetry. Four equal horizontal divisions- three stitched into the backdrop American flag, one which represents the forward plane of the tabletop- establish, at once, both rhythmic regularity and the illusion of three-dimensional space. Upon this visual field, two stacked white plaster forms (a dodecahedron atop a cube) at right are paired at left by a similar pyramid and, above it, the blue starred square of the flag. This mixed play of two versus three dimensions, compounded by a contrast of surfaces- dappled, reflective satin, inert white plaster- as well as a mysterious, idealized light source, yield a kind of intrigue much more personal than Jacobs’ earlier works, one that is all the more effective for its selective reserve.
Others of the most recent, “geometric” works follow this lead, with certain crucial eliminations. Pointedly focused on meaning-laden imagery, these works are absent some of the formal tension that enriches “State”. Color has been virtually eliminated, utilized only in single hues used to pick out the real-world objects in an otherwise black and white context. Pristine platonic forms are juxtaposed with meaning-pungent physical objects that explain the title. “Money” for instance, lays out greenbacks and coins. “Technology” places two gynecologist’s speculums, eerily metallic, glinting with tans and golds, into the cool silvery-gray world of white polyhedrons.
What is interesting in these works is not so much the obvious point, but the underlying bias that casts out anything sensual- color, texture, freedom of handling- and yet often includes psychologically intrusive objects. Described erroneously by the gallery as “photorealism,” these images are rendered from life, not photography. Nevertheless, the artist’s handling of paint lends itself naturally to the distancing, objective impression of a lens translating light to tone. Smooth, controlled blending restricts any juicy slosh or painterly élan that might humanize the painted surface and allow a viewer empathy with the act of painting itself. Instead, we are given proscribed access to a pure, clean world of complete control, a world where intellectualized forms occupy center stage of a visually suggestive morality play. |
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