peninsula

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on July 7, 2012 at 9:06am

Of course Jay- I'll look for you on Facebook.

Comment by Jay Zerbe on July 6, 2012 at 7:13am

thanks kristen! i really appreciate the time you spent with my work. a lot of my thinking is based on the path i took to get to the kind of work i do today. if you are on facebook, friend me and then go to my albums showing work from the 1970's on. i went through a decade of pattern work, really trying to find my way to composition via balancing of movement and repetition. as you have seen, that shows up in my work today. people often think the work is musical. since it is formally about flow. my early work was narrative (highly autobiographical), and i think of visual flow as narrative as well. probably what you are thinking of as musical. i really appreciate your insightful comments. i would love to quote them on facebook, referencing that i received them from "the curator" on A2A. might drum up some interest in this sight. please let me know of you approve of that. thanks! j

Comment by Resident Curator on July 5, 2012 at 8:32pm

Curator’s Comment:  

 

I admire the way you hold together various and dissimilar shapes and colors in your paintings.  The works maintain an interesting rhythmic dynamic, yet don’t rely on traditional figure-ground relationships.  In general they remind me of musical which build on a variable tempo, or dissonant chords.  The unevenness leaves me hanging, and then picks back up in another section.  The result is quite beautiful, as the images seem gestural, and yet subtly orchestrated.  Peninsula is especially nice, with its muted greens complementing the pinkish-orange shapes.  The white areas appear milky or chalky, as if these interstices exist by painting over previously colored layers.  The ghost lines support a component of time or phasing in the work, or transitory passage of ideas or thoughts.  With no recognizable subject to anchor the viewer, the image floats in between pure color field versus a constructed environment.  It is this openness of space and surprise in visual arrangement that I find unusually appealing.