Robert Jessup Contemporary Artist and Painter

Robert Jessup

Statements

Thoughts about Painting and maybe other things.

January, 2025: Paintings From Robinwood Lane


The residence has changed, the studio is new, and the painting methodology has been largely reinvented. Again. But, the activity of Line, the yearnings of Color-- the chase of desire--remain the defining drivers of the work.


The biggest difference is the medium.  Where the earlier works were always done with oil paint, or a combination of an acrylic start and an oil finish, these paintings were done entirely in acrylic.   There was the need to be able to quickly add layers of line and color as the painted fields would grow.  Oil's slow drying time wouldn't allow for this and could no longer accommodate my impatience.  There was my increasing desire for transparency and complex depth.  The paint became very thin, watery, mixed in bowls, applied often with great speed, haste, indiscretion, recklessness.  Improvisatory intuition.  It took some time getting used to the idea that there wouldn't be the familiar tug and pull of the viscous oil medium.  Now it was fast and fluid. Dripping, splattering, flowing.  Painting with colored water.


They usually begin with simple statements of line and color. The elements start to converse. They dance with each other, mimic each other.  Coax each other.  Soon contradictions appear, arguments.  The painting's journey becomes a road trip with squsbbling relatives.  Battle and struggle.


Large forms begin to emerge and collide, piling into each other and on top of each other.  Chaos ensues.   I lay the painting on the floor and cover up large areas with bowl-fills of water paint.  Colored puddles collect, out of control.  Leave it alone now. Overnight, something may happen.


I used to think I was supposed to know what I was doing.  The older I get as a painter, the more it feels that my deliberate dictations are often undermined by erroneous assumptions and misplaced intentions.  The point is always to listen to the painting.  There is a strange circularity in the process.  What happens in the painting is the result of my actions, but the consequences of those actions often have their own life having little to do with my intentions.  So by following what the painting wants, new imagined intentions propel new markings with their own unanticipated results.  And so, the painting and I flow from each other in an ever evolving dance of discovery.






Thoughts from the Whidbey series:

You find yourself alone in an empty room. A room filled with beautiful light reminding you of long summer afternoons, time slowing to a pale yellow with a hint of warmish grey. You begin to move, feeling the space compress with your presence. you turn, go straight, then down, then across. The beautiful empty space is your partner in a solitary dance. You move with concentrated grace, melodious in form. You hum a tune of color that is your identity in this moment to moment song of feeling. your color caresses the color of the room.

You then find yourself coming upon this graceful dance and, with a different voice of color, you begin a new dance. There are two of you now, moving in response to each other, sometimes touching, sometimes veering away, sometimes interweaving your paths. Always aware of each other, always aware of the room and the space between. Your combined dance creates a new form, a new identity that transcends each individual voice. 

As more dancers enter the beautiful room, new voices are added to the songs, creating a greater variety of syncopation and melodious counterpoint. The entire room has been transformed into a massed fabric of pulsing energy and a rich complex sound of vibrating color. Bleached grey sand twining around strands of the summer sky, ribbons of the deep evergreen's blush skipping alongside a coral from an exotic land. An entanglement of multitudes creating a symphony of life.

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How colors coexist is a complex subject because colors can scream and yell and scratch and claw at each other or they can murmur and blend and sink into each other or they can turn their backs on each other in spiteful ignorance. But most mysterious and delightful is when two colors seek to complete each other, when each finds in the other something it lacks, something it desires. Then the two colors hold each other in a tight loving embrace, their union making each one feel more than they were alone. For each, the other has made them whole.

So it occurs to you that you can create two new rooms that will sit side by side, with a definite but permeable barrier in between. And, you will make a solid space of color for each room and you will blend and mix and stir each room's color so that the two rooms begin to desire each other. You make sure that they are different enough from each other so that their conversations can find insightful comparison and discovery. Like sunlight and shade. Like sand and sky. Like beauty and sorrow side by side. 

Then, as if with a conjuror's wand, you gently pull forth from each room voices that grow out of their glowing hues and you move those voices to melody. The dancing voices multiply creating distinctive personalities in their separate spaces. Each chorus is always aware of the other across the boundary. They will mimic each other, sway with each other, almost touch each other. Until, at some point, a melody crosses over and interweaves with the other room's song. More exchanges occur until the two room's initial desire for each other is consummated in a new dynamic of polyphony. Neither room loses its identity in the other, but the intertwining connections bind them together in a kind of symbiosis.

So maybe this is how the world is born. Disparate dancers side by side, interacting, intertwining, weaving together a fabric of reality. A whole that is always more than the sum of the parts, diversity never fused to sameness.

Whidbey Island,
Summer, 2021


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