Jason Stout

IGNITION - Illustrative surreal cloud with bold colors, cubist space nebula

2016

A companion painting to this piece, TECHNOLOGY OF DIRT is owned by the Knoxville Museum of Art. The painting "TECHNOLOGY OF DIRT & AIR" was inspired by an image glanced as I passed by a florist shop window. Inside the florist show was a vibrant floral arrangement overflowing with roses and foliage. On the surface of the window were reflections of architecture behind me and abstracted slivers of light and distorted shapes of things reflected though hardly recognizable. I snapped a few photographs at the time. Several months later, I returned to those images and was intrigued at how the flowers in the image seemed to be made out of crystal and how the reflections on the window "interrupted" the ability to easily make out the forms in the photograph. I was intrigued by the complexity of the image and how recognizable elements emerged and then faded into abstraction. As I worked on this painting, I wanted it to be as if it was coming into crisp focus, while also becoming a complicated tapestry of shapes and colors. I have made six paintings in this series thus far. Jered Sprecher is a visual artist who was born in Lincoln, Nebraska (1976). He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and his B.A. from Concordia University in Nebraska. He has taught at Princeton University and Cornell University. Mr. Sprecher currently lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee. Jered Sprecher’s studio practice explores the “handwriting” of humankind. The vocabulary that he draws from is focused on the vast array of marks and images in one’s surroundings. From this vocabulary he samples visual motifs and imports them into his paintings and drawings. These works continually focus on remnants and fragments that are captured in the midst of change, then edited and fused together in the space of painting. These images are pregnant with a longing to communicate. The success and failure of these “messages in a bottle” are the basis of his work. Mr. Sprecher has had solo exhibitions at Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York; the Art Gallery of Knoxville; The Cress Gallery-UTC, Chattanooga; and Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York; Brooklyn Academy of Music (Next Next Art), New York; Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville; Des Moines Art Center; Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; Arthouse, Austin; Mark Moore Gallery...

Jason Stout was born in 1977. He received his BFA in studio art from the University of Tennessee at Martin in 2001 and a MFA in Painting from the University of Texas at San Antonio i...

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Paul Manes was born May 4, 1948 in Austin, Texas. He began his professional career in New York City in the early 1980s. His art has been widely exhibited in America and Europe and hi...