Parris Jaru

A Place to Hide - Surrealist Figurative Painting

2019

Parris Jaru's Head Full of Air is a 9 x 8 inches surrealist oil painting. The main color is blue. A surrealist representation of a human face can be recognized. The surface is define...

Parris Jaru's The Last Time I Saw It is a 16 x 11-inch surrealist oil painting. The primary colors are black and red. The canvas surface has a thick impasto of paint, made with plant-based pigments that Jaru collects during his long exploratory trips through India. The imagery brings a surrealist human figure, with all the body features exaggerated as if in a caricature. NY-born Parris Jaru comes from a Jamaican, Blackfoot Nation, and Arawak Nation background from both his parents. His work is informed by the vivid colors and imagery experienced in his childhood years spent in the coastal town of St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. His exploratory journeys in India enriched his work with a sensibility to natural plant-based pigments that he grinds with oils for his paintings. In his Brooklyn studio, Jaru brings all these cultural inspirations together. His entire body of work is informed by an intentional childlike, faux-naïve style, constantly shifting between figurative and abstraction. Even though at times, Jaru has been working on somber and entirely figure-free paintings, most of his work is defined by poignantly colored and playful surrealistic figures. Jaru often draws his figures with a continuous line emerging from a thick impasto of paint made with powders of Sea Algae, Hibiscus, Gymnema Sylvestre, and Turmeric. Related keywords: Caribbean Artist...

Oil on canvas, 1980's by William Skotte Olsen, Denmark. Monogrammed lower right: WSO. Framed Typical are the figures whose faces appear flat and mask-like. In the 1980's and 1990's O...

"33" is a painting by the French artist - designer Hélène Cohen Carricaburu. Through her art, she has a very sharp, abstract and unique style of bright and colorful expression. Abo...