Parris Jaru

The Valley of Dancers - Expressionist Figurative Painting in Black and Blue

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...

John Hultberg Oil on canvas Panorama of pictures. 1998 Hand signed lower right, J. Hultberg ‘98. Artist, date, and title written on verso. Canvas 25.5”H x 35”W, Frame 26”H x 35.5”W. Oil painting depicting a mosaic of photographs overlooking an abstract geometric landscape. John Hultberg (1922 – 2005) was an American Abstract expressionist and Abstract realist painter. Early in his career he was related to the Bay Area Figurative Movement; he was also a lecturer and playwright. John Hultberg was born in 1922 in Berkeley, California. Hultberg attended Fresno State College, graduating in 1943. During World War II, he was a Navy lieutenant. After the war, his education at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) (now the San Francisco Art Institute) was funded by the G.I. Bill. His teachers included Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still and he was a classmate of Richard Diebenkorn, who was also a mentor, James Budd Dixon, Walter Kuhlman, Frank Lobdell, and George Stillman, which whom he created a portfolio of 17 lithographs. This 1948 portfolio, titled Drawings, has been acknowledged as a landmark in Abstract Expressionist printmaking. The group has been referred to as "The Sausalito Six," because most, lived in Sausalito, north of San Francisco. Many of the "First Generation" artists in this West Coast movement were avid fans of Abstract Expressionism, and worked in that manner, until several of them abandoned non-objective painting in favor of working with the figure. Among these First Generation Bay Area Figurative School artists were: David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Rex Ashlock, Elmer Bischoff, Glenn Wessels, Wayne Thiebaud, Raimonds Staprans, and James Weeks. The "Bridge Generation" included the artists: Henrietta Berk, Nathan Oliveira, Theophilus Brown, Paul Wonner, Roland Petersen, John Hultberg, and Frank Lobdell. He was also a contemporary of Clay Spohn and David Park. Hultberg studied at the Art Students League of New York beginning in 1952. Hultberg was first married to Hilary Blech. In 1961 Hultberg met fellow artist Lynne Mapp Drexler...